Kyle Phaneuf: Pieces

2012-02-04T18:25:00.000-05:00

It's a new year and that means it's time to take a look at my most listened to albums according to iTunes. Keep in mind iTunes doesn't account for iPod listens or anything but what I listen to at my computer, and since I've gone through a number of laptops and hard drives, this only accounts for the last couple of years. Okay, let's get into it!

10. Women: Public Strain

Yes. This is a great record. And like all great records, it takes a few listens to begin to appreciate it. The songs are very fuzzy and off-kilter, and that can seem like shapelessness on the first few listens. If you stick with it, though, you'll see that underneath all the hazy effects and strange arrangements, there's some really amazing songwriting buried within.

9. Blue Hawaii: Blooming Summer

Oh, man. I hope these guys record some more music. This album is a couple years old now, but it is so good. Really pretty but interesting pop music, with just the right amount of sadness seeping in at the edges.

8. Bon Iver: Blood Bank

Weird! This is the EP Bon Iver released following their debut album. It most notably features the song "Woods," which I have no less than three versions of in my iTunes. This one, The Volcano Choir's "Still" and Kanye West's "Lost in the World." I didn't think I listened to this that much, but okay!

7. Gem Club: Acid and Everything

Alright! This is an EP from the piano and violin duo Gem Club, whose music is both incredibly sad and incredibly beautiful. No surprise, then, that they struck a chord with me.

6. The Local Natives: Daytrotter Sessions

Here's something strange: This is the result of the Local Natives stopping by to record some tracks for the website Daytrotter.com to promote their album Gorilla Manor. Incidentally, I think these alternate versions are actually much better than their album counterparts.

5. MellowHype: BlackenedWhite

Odd Future! These guys blew me away from literally the first time I heard them -- their music sounds dangerous, even scary in its own way -- and their live shows at SXSW sealed the deal. They've put out a lot of material, but the best Wolf Gang release by far is MellowHype's BlackenedWhite. It's no surprise I've listened to this album a lot: It's consistently great from start to finish.

4. Kanye West: Good Friday

This is interesting. Good Friday isn't a proper Kanye West album but rather the collection of tracks he posted on his website in anticipation of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Strangely, I listened to this bonus material more than the record they were intended to promote. It's not that big of a surprise when you consider Good Friday included the killer title track, the original releases of Fantasy tracks "Monster" and "Devil in a New Dress" and solid b-sides like "The Joy" and the truly bizarre (but inexplicably great) Raekwon/Justin Bieber collaboration "Runaway Love."

3. Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz

Sufjan Stevens is definitely one of my absolute favorite recording artists, but is his most recent release really my favorite? Possibly! It features what is probably his single best song, the epic in length "Impossible Soul," as well as a host of other incredibly rich, compelling tracks, especially "I Want to be Well" and "Vesuvius."

2. Songs: Ohia: Songs: Ohia

The very first Songs: Ohia album places at number two. I'm sure I've listened to The Lioness a lot more -- it could very well be my single favorite album -- but I've come to this debut release more recently. Incidentally, it requires a lot of listens. These songs can seem very simple and rough at first, lacking in the hooks that make future Songs: Ohia albums so effective, but after a few listens, you begin to notice the nuance and subtlety at play here. This is especially true of the lyrics, which are among the finest Jason Molina has ever penned. I actually really love this record, perhaps even more so for its unabashed difficulty.

1. Mountain Man: Soft Skin

Handily beating some of my all time favorite musicians like Jason Molina, Sufjan Stevens and Kanye West, the most played album in my iTunes comes instead from the folky, often a capella harmonizers of Mountain Man. I'm okay with that! These ladies have wonderful voices, write great songs and are a delight to see live. This three song single is brief at just under eight minutes, but breath-takingly beautiful. There is something to be said, I suppose, for something so succinct and refined to perfection.

2011-09-13T16:51:00.001-04:00

For those of us familiar with Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, its sequel, the recently released Dragon Age II, holds a lot of surprises. Chief among them: Dragon Age II isn't half bad!

To be fair, neither was Origins, but for all its promise and potential, Origins was severely limited by a tragically botched execution. Even disregarding problems with inventory, player management and persistent glitches, Origins' real problem was that it wasn't any fun to play. The combat was more often than not a repetitious grind, and there was strategy to it, sure, but only the most devout dungeon masters would have the patience to micromanage the trivialities while casual players were left with stupid companions fighting boring battles.

This was particularly unfortunate because Origins was playing with a lot of interesting, heady ideas. The narrative wasn't anything revolutionary (it was still a game called Dragon Age, after all) but it featured intriguing political themes and pressing questions, some of which affected the outcome of the game profoundly. Shame, then, that the actual meat of the game felt like a chore the player was obligated to get through just to continue the story.

Dragon Age II isn't really reinventing the wheel. Players still control a central hero joined by three other fighters with questionable motives and can still choose to either micromanage their team or let the fights play out on their own. But enough has been changed to make the battles fun in and of themselves, and that's important. Regardless of which class you choose for the protagonist (between warrior, rogue or mage), there are plenty of neat tricks and techniques to utilize, as well as skill maps that allow you to specialize your hero to a battle style you prefer.

The companions, for their part, seem to be a bit smarter themselves. Some players will delight in tweaking the minute details of each of their characters, but for the rest of us, you can certainly get by with letting the peripheral fighters level up automatically and stick to pre-programmed tactical choices.

Meanwhile, outside of the combat, the one thing Origins did well -- the player's ability to choose the direction the plot goes -- seems to have been expanded too. Unlike in Origins, players are a bit more limited in customizing their hero. Hawke, the protagonist, must be a human -- no dwarves or elves this time around, and thus, no species-specific training missions.

From there, however, the player has tremendous control over Hawke's decisions, even down to the tone of his or her remarks to other characters. A dialogue wheel allows the player to select from multiple conversation options, like diplomatic, sarcastic or hostile.

The biggest choices come when Hawke is confronted with various factions and forced to align him or herself with one of them. Indeed, depending on which sides you choose to take, your game could end up in a very different place than another player's. Of course, the ability to befriend, antagonize or even romance your companions remains as a welcome hold over from Origins.

Here's another surprise for Dragon Age II players, and one that might not be so welcome: Unlike Origins, this entry in the series is limited to essentially one locale, the city of Kirkwall and its immediate surrounding area. Whereas Origins fit a more epic model of storytelling, following the protagonist across a wide world and its various towns, caves and castles, this time around, Hawke essentially stays in one large city throughout the whole game.

At first this seems like a step back, but it ends up being a strength as well. For all its innovations, Origins was still a story about the one man (or woman) who could save a world coming to its end, just like the hundreds, maybe even thousands of other games that can say the same.

There is no doomsday scenario to save anyone from in Dragon Age II. Hawke is not the "chosen one" who, alone, is capable of fending off a pure evil. Instead, he or she navigates the politics of the city of Kirkwall, choosing to back some causes and oppose others. There's still a story to be told here, it's just narrower in scope, and in fact, that makes it all the more interesting.

Also interesting: the game is split into three very distinct acts that influence one another, but are ultimately kept separate. All of this may imply a smaller narrative, and that's true. But it's also a better one, the tighter focus allowing for a more nuanced story that feels believable, even relatable to the real world.

There are some quirks. Loading times seem a bit unreasonable, considering so much of the action takes place in one city. The comparison may not be fair, but how is it that you can drive from Union City, across Manhattan, through Brooklyn and into Queens without stopping in Grand Theft Auto IV, but you can't walk through a considerably smaller city -- or even open a door into a building -- without seeing a loading screen in Dragon Age II?

Another complaint: Hawke's companions seem uniformly insane. It's not just that you can't make everybody happy, it often seems like you can't make anybody happy, to the extent that even giving someone a gift will often set them off against you. On the other hand, crazy as these characters are, their irrational behavior leads to some of the most interesting choices in the game, so you can't really fault them that.

There are also still some pretty gnarly glitches. No deal breakers, but you can and probably will get stuck somewhere. And you could also make the case that the constantly recycled environments detract from the gameplay. They don't, or at least, not irreparably, but the case could be made.

Either way, these are all trifles when viewed within the larger context of a game that is entertaining literally from beginning to end (about 45 hours of gameplay in all in this play-through). Unlike Origins, there aren't any brutally boring slogs like the Darkroads or the Fade, the regular battles remain fun throughout and the bosses have interesting fighting patterns that break up the routines of smaller brawls.

Dragon Age II's greatest accomplishment, however, is giving the player the feeling that he or she is truly guiding the story rather than just watching it play out. Early video games didn't have any narration; they didn't need it. Pac-Man ate dots and ran from ghosts simply because that's what he did. But as technologies advanced and video games became narrative devices, game creators either forgot or didn't bother to match advancements in graphics and gameplay with their increasingly inseparable storytelling.

For too long, playing a narrative game (as almost all of them are, ever since games left the arcades for PCs and home consoles) meant the player could only follow a predetermined story, the only option to either succeed or fail at attaining this already established endpoint. Why doesn't the player get to have any say in that? How interactive is that experience, really, if you can never change the arc of a story you're ostensibly supposed to control?

Dragon Age II makes good on the promise that interactive entertainment can also mean interactive storytelling. It isn't perfect, but it's at least a step in the right direction, an assurance that the way you play a game can and should radically change the world it inhabits. For that, if nothing else, it deserves to be commended. The fact that it is very often fun along the way is even better.

2011-07-18T17:49:00.004-04:00

Repetoire: Jerzy Kosinski
In which the author watches, reads or listens to the entire body of work of an artist so you don't have to.

Before his suicide in 1991, Jerzy Kosinski wrote ten novels of brutal, calculated menace that sought to expose the absolute darkest and most depraved elements of humanity. His protagonists are almost universally mean, manipulative and sociopathic, but they aren't hypocritical, and through their destructive and sometimes shocking behavior, the truest and most pure instincts of mankind inevitably rise to the surface.

It can be an acquired taste, certainly, but Kosinski's minimalist prose and richly drawn characters are well worth the effort.

Pièce de résistance : The Devil Tree

Kosinski's most famous book by far is The Painted Bird, his (mostly) true account of how, as a boy, he escaped the Holocaust in Poland, and how that escape was nearly as horrifying as the Holocaust itself.

Perhaps the purest distillation of Jerzy Kosinski, however, came nearly a decade later in 1973's The Devil Tree. Like most of the author's later work, Devil Tree isn't held together by an overarching narrative as much as it's a collection of loosely related vignettes. Kosinski once explained the way he writes a novel is by typing out a first draft and then cutting out as much extraneous material as possible, so only the bare essentials of the story are left.

It's an unusual writing style but the end result is very exciting -- Kosinski cuts close to the bone and only the most powerful and interesting material makes the grade. Individual episodes build on each other, creating momentum as the protagonist (and the narrative) seem to spiral out of control.

And in The Devil Tree, all of Kosinski's favorite themes are in place: The privileged playboy whose wealth and endless free time only offer him a listless and unsatisfying existence. The unescapable drive of lust, crippling all other emotions and excluding the possibility of any lasting or meaningful relationships. And the selfish, even cruel search for power and excitement that only a person of such affluence could pursue, though the pay-off is rarely worth the risk.

Essential Reading

Arguably Kosinski's most purely entertaining story came toward the end of his storied career in 1982's Pinball. Here, he largely forgoes the disconnected vignettes of his other work and focuses on chronicling a bizarre love-triangle straight through. In this case, the Kosinski surrogate is Domostroy, a Philip Glass-esque modernist composer who becomes obsessed with uncovering the true identity of Goddard, an incredibly successful pop star whose appearance is unknown to even his session musicians and record executives.

The music industry intrigue adds an extra level to Kosinski's usual sex and power obsessed prose, and even as he seems to be satirizing pulp fiction, he manages to get the same thrills.

Kosinski won an Oscar for his screen adaptation of his novel Being There, the story of a socially isolated gardener who's mistaken for an elite business tycoon. Here Kosinski is taking a pointed stab at not just the modern world's obsession with celebrity, but also the inherently ridiculous nature of the power that comes with business and political ties.

Kosinski's first novel, the aforementioned The Painted Bird differs wildly from his other work, but it's still a semi-autobiographical account of human brutality. The story of a young boy's journey through rural western Europe during the Holocaust is endlessly fascinating but relentlessly horrifying.

Further Reading

Most of Kosinski's novels parody pulp fiction, but 1975's Cockpit is the purest example. It's a novel about a womanizing secret agent who constructs elaborate assassinations and daring escapes -- the only difference between this satire and an actual dime-novel is the barely contained cynicism lurking underneath.

1969's Steps is the novel that introduced the Kosinski-model that would later be perfected in The Devil Tree. Here, Kosinski's sights are set more toward culture and politics, but the way the human element interacts with them is highlighted, as always.

1979's Passion Play is perhaps Kosinski's sweetest novel, a story about a modern day knight-errant traveling the world and learning the meaning of true loss. But even as there's a love story in the center of the polo-playing protagonist's narrative, there's also a great scene when he works for a South American dictator, lending the requisite level of violence, and another that takes place in a Plato's Retreat-style swingers' club, allowing for more than enough sexual intrigue.

Unadvised Reading

In 1977's Blind Date, the Kosinski-model was wearing thin. Date is often too brutal, the main character too disconnected to reality to really gleam anything from him. It's not a total write-off, but Kosinski has explored the same themes to greater effect many times before.

Written in response to accusations that his novels were ghost-written, Kosinski's final novel, 1988's The Hermit of 69th Street, is effective as satire but not a particularly great read. Mammoth by Kosinski standards, the idea being it was an unfinished manuscript (pre-story slicing) where nearly every sentence is sourced with footnotes and the novel itself has not yet been trimmed down by an editor.

If that sounds like a funny, interesting idea, you're right, it is -- for about the first 50 pages. In the remaining 450, however, it tends to get in the way of the story, or what little story there is. It's unfortunate that the life and career of one of the world's greatest writers ended with controversy, but Hermit's real problem is that nothing ever really happens.

As for the allegations that prompted Hermit in the first place, the jury is still out, but they've always seemed ill-founded to say the least. While it's true that his style changed during the course of his career -- as has already been mentioned -- so does that of nearly every good author. The early, realistic stories of Jorge Luis Borges bear almost no resemblance to the metaphysical fantasies of his later work, and the same can be said of most great writers.

Kosinski, in fact, seems a particularly strange author to accuse of using ghost-writers, because few writers are able to maintain such a distinctive voice over the course of an entire career. Even as stylistic choices changed, Kosinski never curbed his indulgence of his pet obsessions: wealth, luxury, sex, loneliness, depression, violence and suspicion. From the first pages of The Painted Bird to the final lines of The Hermit of 69th Street, Kosinski held an unwaveringly dark and disdainful view of the world and the humanity that occupies it, a pessimism that colored all his work but unfortunately led to the taking of his own life as well.

Whether Kosinski wrote his novels or not -- and from a reader's viewpoint it seems had to believe he did not -- they remain one of the great bodies of work in modern literature. His satire has remained as relevant and biting as ever, and his cynicism seems more justified now than ever before. If Kosinski's commitment to the truth was questioned in life, it seems positively self-evident in his death.

2011-07-05T14:43:00.008-04:00

Repetoire: Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All
In which the author watches, reads or listens to the entire body of work of an artist so you don't have to.

This ten-deep hip-hop collective (OFWGKTA, for short) can seem a bit overwhelming to an outsider - there are simply so many releases by so many talented people, it can be difficult to know where to even begin. It's a good idea to begin somewhere, though, because even as young as this crew is (Earl Sweatshirt was only 16 when he recorded his album while Frank Ocean was the token old guy at 23), they're also making some of the most interesting, provocative and original hip-hop available today.

Pièce de résistance : MellowHype - BlackenedWhite

Odd Future leader Tyler, the Creator is getting the most attention from both the press and the fans by far, and that makes sense. He's incredibly talented and largely responsible for the Odd Future aesthetic as a whole. As an MC, he's able to switch between violent rage and sincere vulnerability in the space of a few lines. As a producer, his beats weave complex melodies together into a beautiful, but often deeply eerie whole. He even succeeds as a graphic designer (he designed most of the crew's album covers, and redefined Cooper Black in the process) and video director (see the videos for "Yonkers," "French!" and "She").

But while Tyler is a jack-of-all trades, he's overshadowed as an MC by Hodgy Beats and as a producer by Left Brain, and when these two more specialized musicians come together the results are pretty incredible.

Thus is the case with MellowHype, Hodgy and Left Brain's sub-group within Odd Future, and their best album (and the best Wolf Gang-related album by far) is their sophomore release BlackenedWhite. Left Brain's beats, like Tyler's, become the focus of the songs, changing and evolving and guiding the lyrics rather than the other way around. Hodgy, for his part, remains consistently entertaining as a lyricist and performer, using his vocal quirks to further support his skill for wordplay. BlackenedWhite also features appearances by nearly every other Odd Future performer, from Mike G's smooth style infecting "Loaded," to Tyler's devastating verse on "Fuck the Police" to Frank Ocean's hooks on "Rico" and "Hell." A particular standout is the Tyler and Earl supported track "Corduroy."

Essential Listening

Perhaps not as accomplished as BlackenedWhite, but still great in its own right, MellowHype's first record, YelloWhite laid the foundation for Hodgy and Left Brain's partnership to flourish. "CopKiller," another collaboration with Earl Sweatshirt, provides the standout here.

Both of Tyler, the Creator's albums deserve listens as well. His debut, Bastard is perhaps the easier listen, featuring "hits" like "French!" and the Earl duet "AssMilk" alongside more experimental fare like "Wheels" and "Inglorious." Follow-up Goblin has provided the most visible Odd Future songs yet, and arguably two of the best: the suicidal soliloquy "Yonkers" and the Hodgy Beats supported breakout hit "Sandwitches."

Also make sure to check out Odd Future's second mixtape, Radical, which finds otherwise wasted beats mercifully saved by the great rappers they deserve. This is especially true of Gucci Mane's "Lemonade" and Rich Boy's "Drop," both getting the Earl Sweatshirt treatment.

Further Listening

It's taken for granted by this point that Odd Future's greatest MC is also its youngest, the now missing in action Earl Sweatshirt. Even as young as he is, Earl has found a truly innovative and distinctive voice for himself, able to twist sentences nearly to their breaking point and make legitimate phrases sound like gibberish on their first listen.

A bit of shame, then, that instead of focusing strictly on his wordplay, Earl decided to introduce a rape-obsessed serial killer character with his first album, Earl. He's undoubtedly still got the skill, but it feels misused in the service of the bizarre and violent fantasies that make up the album. Hopefully, when he returns to hip-hop from his unwilling excommunication in Samoa, he'll be ready to evolve as a story teller as well.

Domo Genesis' love letter to marijuana, debut Rolling Papers, is inconsistent, but features some true gems for those willing to look for them. Tyler provides one of the great Odd Future hooks in the title track, and his rap-battle with Domo in "Supermarket" is one of the funniest (and most fun) moments in the OF discography.

Odd Future's resident crooner, Frank Ocean, released a breezy, sun-soaked pop album with Nostalgia/Ultra. Highlight "Songs for Women," in particular, can match anything on the contemporary R&B charts in pop accessibility.

Mike G is a wildly underrated player in the Odd Future camp. His flow is slower and more relaxed than some others in the Wolf Gang, but his rhymes retain a feeling of effortless cool that's easy to get enthusiastic about. His album Ali isn't as strong as it could or should be, but it's worth a listen.

Unadvised Listening

The synthpop duo Jet Age of Tomorrow seem to be operating outside of Odd Future's usual manic creepiness. Their two albums aren't really worth pursuing, although Journey to the 5th Echelon's "Want You Still," featuring Kilo Kish, is a delightfully innocent reprieve from Wolf Gang's darker material.

Also stay away from the earliest material like Hodgy's Dena Tape and the first mixtape. It's obvious Odd Future still had some growing to do at this point, but they've certainly since come into their own as artists and, hopefully, they won't be done growing anytime soon.

2011-06-19T17:05:00.008-04:00

Repertoire: Woody Allen
In which the author watches, reads or listens to the entire body of work of an artist so you don't have to.

Woody Allen has been putting out close to a film a year since the 1970s, and while some of his films are among the funniest and most poignant ever put to celluloid, the sheer amount of his work means a lot of it, perhaps even most of it, isn't worth the effort. Still, there's something to be admired about an artist who refuses to slow down, and this artist in particular has certainly earned that right.

Pièce de résistance: Stardust Memories

Many of Woody Allen's films use a classic picture from one of his cinematic heroes as a jumping off point. In this case, Stardust Memories is a clear homage to Federico Felinni's 8 ½, and like that film, Memories is about a filmmaker with a severe case of director's block, working on a movie that isn't going as he planned and subsequently calling into his question his entire life and career because of it.

But even as Memories takes it's central conceit from another film, it's also perhaps the most personal film of Allen's career. The filmmaker in question (played by Allen himself, naturally) is trying to make a serious, intellectual film, all the while the studio, the press and even his fans keep asking when he's going to make some more of his "old, funny movies."

Coincidentally or not, Memories itself is arguably the single funniest film Allen ever made. He allowed himself some incredible freedom both as a filmmaker and a comic, though even at its most surreal, Memories has a built-in self-deprecation that keeps it from drifting into pretension. Instead, the bizarre asides and meta-filmmaking serve only to enforce the film as the most adventurous and enjoyable Woody Allen has ever made.

Essential Viewing

Annie Hall is Allen's most famous film and certainly one of the most influential the filmmaker has to his name. It was with this film Allen took the romantic comedy genre away from broad humor and happy endings into a reality anyone in (or out of) a relationship would recognize. It isn't always pretty, but it always feels true, and there's plenty of solid comedy along the way to make the melancholy go down a bit easier.

Sleeper was one of the "early, funny movies" the audiences were demanding more of in Stardust Memories and it's easy to see why. It's slapstick, for sure, but slapstick in a smart way, like the best of Buster Keaton or Groucho Marx. There's also some pretty slick satire mixed in, so Sleeper appeals to the high-brow and low-brow alike.

The Purple Rose of Cairo is simultaneously the most purely fantastic and also one of the most purely sad films in Allen's catalog. The romance between Jeff Daniels and Mia Farrow (and the extraordinary circumstances that bring them together) are infinitely charming, yet the film couldn't be more heartbreaking. It's a film that simply works on every level, and it remains a testament to Allen's ability to articulate emotion like few other filmmakers can.

Crimes and Misdemeanors portray two very distinct sides of Allen's obsessions that succeed in reinforcing one another rather than canceling each other out. One half of the film is more comedy-centric, while the other is almost pure tragedy, and instead of forcing these separate worlds to collide with one another, Allen takes the more difficult but satisfying route - letting them run parallel to one another, commenting on one another and ultimately justifying one another.

Further Viewing

Broadway Danny Rose makes it easy to see why people fall for Woody Allen. His sad-sack agent is so charming, so sincere, you can't help but love him even as you pity him. Mia Farrow also gives a great performance completely against type as a brash but falsely confident foil to Allen's hangdog sad sack.

Sweet and Lowdown, like many of Allen's best films, finds a way to make you like and feel for its protagonist despite his many and significant flaws. Sean Penn's master guitar player is so angry, obnoxious and self-absorbed you want to hate him. But when we probe his life we see him for what he really is: a broken man trying desperately to fend off his own loneliness and depression. It's a testament to Allen that we care about, even root for him to succeed in the end.

Like Sleeper, Love & Death is silly, but it does silly very well. There's little of the emotional intensity of Allen's later films, but as the title suggests, Allen is commenting on some weighty themes, even in light of the wonderful absurdity going on around them.

Deconstructing Harry walks dangerously close to the line between great Allen film and forgettable Allen film, but somehow manages to never quite fall in. Instead, Harry ends up being a delightfully surrealist play on art, relationships and the ever-present melancholy that prevails all of Allen's films. The ending sequence set in Hell is one of Allen's finest moments.

Unadvised Viewing

Almost everything you've heard about Allen films is true. His strictly serious films (Interiors, September, Another Woman) are to be avoided at all costs. They have no sense of humor at all, which is incredibly strange coming from one of the funniest people on the planet.

Later Allen comedies (Mighty Aphrodite, Anything Else, Melinda and Melinda) are pretty awful in their own right. He tended to get caught up in very similar themes (older men dating much younger women, mostly) and repeated himself endlessly, which wouldn't be so bad if the films were funny. They're not.

Of course, Allen has had some late-career successes too. Vicky Christina Barcelona isn't up to par with Allen's best work, but it's considered a comeback for good reason. And his latest, Midnight in Paris, returns to the charming surrealism of his greatest works. So don't write him off just yet: Even at 76, Woody Allen still has a few surprises left in him.

2010-10-02T17:05:00.001-04:00

There's a glaring irony inherent in social networking of any kind - the tendency for it to isolate people rather than bring them together - and David Fincher's The Social Network, which chronicles the rise of Facebook, wisely follows suit. It's a film that traffics in ironies. Chief among them, perhaps, is the fact that Facebook was created by a social outcast.

Stepping outside his comfort-zone of playing intelligent yet socially awkward literary nerds, Jesse Eisenberg here plays an intelligent yet socially awkward computer nerd in the form of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg was asked by fellow Harvard students to program a social networking site called HarvardConnection - a sort of Friendster or MySpace clone - but only for people with a harvard.edu email address. Zuckerberg quickly saw the potential for the idea, agreed to help with the site and then promptly took the idea as his own and started "The Facebook" behind their backs.

Which leads to the second irony: Facebook caught on from the beginning purely because of the exclusivity it went on to abandon completely. In the first incarnation, you could only register through invite and with a harvard.edu email. This led to other Ivey League schools, which led to other prestigious schools, which led to simply having a .edu address, which was eventually thrown out altogether in a bid to claim as many members as possible.

This meteoric rise came with the help of Zuckerberg's only friend, business major Eduardo Saverin, played sympathetically by Andrew Garfield (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and eventually backed by the interest of Napster mastermind Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake in an incredibly ironic bit of stunt casting.

Saverin and Parker play opposing sides to Zuckerberg's quest for success. Saverin is cool-headed and reasonable, going through traditional avenues to aid a website that is in and of itself not a traditional avenue. Parker, on the other hand, is all rockstar bravado, building Zuckerberg and Facebook up through out of control parties, expensive dinners and nights at the club.

Which leads to the final irony in Zuckerberg's (and Facebook's) story. He created the site to gain notoriety and attention when he wasn't accepted through the usual channels of campus social life. He didn't go to the parties and, unlike his friend Saverin, he was never invited into any exclusive clubs.

But in the end, after getting more than adequate notoriety and 500 million "friends" to share it with, Zuckerberg finds himself more alone than ever, grappling with a new, impersonal way of trying to connect with the outside world. One which he had a large part in creating, but one where he finds himself equally as unsuccessful.

2010-08-02T13:48:00.003-04:00

The first noteworthy thing you'll notice about Red Dead Redemption is that it's a western - certainly an anomaly in game design. There simply aren't a lot of western games, and it makes sense, if you think about it. Western films started to fall out of fashion at precisely the same time video games gained it.

But that's kind of a shame, because who wouldn't want to play the part of renegade frontiersman in the old wild west? The world-weary cowboys, the wide open frontier, the very lawlessness of the towns and the people in them - it all seems tailor fit for a good video game. And yet we've never had one: some have tried but they've all failed to capture the feeling of adventure and intrigue a wild west game should have by default. They all failed, that is, until Rockstar Games decided to try fitting the western setting on their signature Grand Theft Auto games.

Depending on how you feel about Grand Theft Auto, the concept of a Grand Theft Auto western could be met with either anticipation and excitement or contempt and scorn. In that respect, there are no surprises in Red Dead Redemption. The people who've had enough Grand Theft Auto will simply not be interested, but those who eagerly await each new installment will find not only something to tide them over until the next "proper" GTA, but perhaps an entirely new series to obsess over.

That's not to say Red Dead Redemption is purely Grand Theft Auto with an old-west palette-swap - it's not. And in fact, it isn't even to say enjoying Grand Theft Auto guarantees enjoyment here. Because while Redemption is very similar in style and execution to it's older-brother series, there are also some major differences.

The biggest and most apparent from the outset is that Redemption is paced dramatically slower. It's certainly possible to take Grand Theft Auto slowly - to ease into the criminal lifestyle gradually and spend considerable time in each neighborhood before moving onto the next. But Auto also makes it very easy to move fast. The cars are fast, the city is fast and the ascent up the criminal ladder is ridiculously fast.

If there's one thing that can be said about Red Dead Redemption it's this: It gets the romance of the old-west right, and that means it moves slowly. Like the John Ford classics it references and imitates, Redemption unfolds at a snail's pace. That's not to say the action isn't there - the shoot-outs and chases rival Grand Theft Auto's - but it can take a while to get to them.

In fact, it can take a while to get anywhere. The world Redemption takes place in is not huge by any means, but it feels almost overwhelming on the back of a trotting horse. The settlements are spaced out between large expanses of barren and empty land and while there's plenty of people moving about the horse trails, go off the beaten path and it could be a long time before you see anyone at all.

This could sound like a complaint, and to many people, surely, it will be a matter of consternation. But it's actually perfect for the game and the atmosphere it's trying to invoke. In fact, while you can move around quite quickly if you go everywhere in full gallop (or use the obnoxious "quick-travel" command that keeps popping up in video games), you'd literally be defeating the purpose of the game and, as likely as not, your own enjoyment of it.

Like Grand Theft Auto before it, Red Dead Redemption is a game from which you get what you give. In other words, it's certainly possible to power through the missions and "complete" the game in a relatively short time. But in doing so, you'd be sucking out almost all enjoyment of it. It may sound trite, but the best moments in Redemption are not the giant fire-fights or the fast-paced chases. The best moments are stumbling on something unexpected in the middle of the desert, miles away from anyone or anything. Just you, your horse, and the setting sun.

And indeed, it can't be argued that Redemption is a beautiful game. This slow-burn atmosphere wouldn't work if the game didn't have the visual chops to back it up, but Redemption is consistently astounding to look at, especially at dusk and dawn, when the sun paints the expansive sky above a soft pink and orange. The desert landscapes are breathtaking, the horses are crafted in great detail and even the towns and settlements themselves are perfectly constructed, with just the right amount of fading paint and decay and a particularly fine attention to design details like hand-painted signs and dilapidated advertisements.

If there was a nitpick to be made, it would be that the resolutions sometimes don't keep up with your character, so you'll see mountains or towns in the distance change appearances suddenly. But this happens sparingly and it's far from a deal-breaker. If anything, what you notice playing Redemption is how right everything looks, from the grizzled and scarred face of the protagonist, John Marston, to the silky fur of the horses he rides.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to introduce Mr. Marston, and his purpose within the game. The origin for Red Dead Redemption was Red Dead Revolver, but in name only. It was developed by Capcom and merely published by Rockstar, who apparently were eager to get a hold of a license they thought (and thought correctly) they could work with. In that game, the protagonist is 100% Man With No Name rip-off, right down to the cringe-worthy Clint Eastwood impression.

John Marston is a much more relatable character, yet he retains his mystery. He arrives in "New Austin," Texas from the city with a couple of government lackeys in tow and immediately sets off to kill the area's most notorious criminal - an attempt which quickly puts him out of commission. Plenty of characters ask what Marston is doing in New Austin, and some outright accuse him of being a government spy. And though Marston drops hints throughout the narrative, his true history is kept a secret throughout the majority of the game.

And despite being a vigilante killer, Marston is a likable guy, which probably says a lot for voice actor Rob Wiethoff, who makes him feel human, and sometimes vulnerable, even at his most violent. The other characters in the game follow suit; even bit-players like the general store clerk or the poker-playing blacksmith are fleshed out with their own personalities and (usually quite good) voice acting.

And unlike Grand Theft Auto, the world of Redemption is small enough that most characters you encounter are unique, even to the point of having two names. This is, perhaps, more exciting than it seems, because it gives the implication that the way you play - either as a lawless renegade or a chivalrous vigilante - truly does affect the world around you.

The missions hint at this too, by occasionally giving you simple choices as to how you want to complete them. Mostly though, these choices are inconsequential and, eventually, they stop cropping up altogether, without ever changing the gameplay in any meaningful way.

The missions themselves, though, are pretty solid. The early ones have a lot of straight-forward traveling, which could easily get boring without Grand Theft Auto's wealth of music for the journey (Redemption's horses, unfortunately, do not come equipped with radios). Rockstar gets around this by filling the travel time with idle conversation which has the dual effect of filling you in on the events going on in the world around you and letting Marston reveal more of his own past and secret mission.

And while these early missions start quaint - rounding up cattle, picking up supplies from the local town - they quickly ramp up the severity. Soon, you'll found yourself killing literally dozens of men in one chase sequence. This is kind of ridiculous - because who are all these guys and where did they come from? But this exaggerated violence is par for the course for Rockstar, who've previously given us entire countries worth of mobsters and gang members to mow down.

It's important to mention, though, that even when the body count gets stupid high, Redemption still manages to feel grounded in a plausible universe - in much the same way Grand Theft Auto had before it. There are certainly a lot of gang members in Redemption's old west, but it mostly pulls back from making you feel like you're wiping out the entire population.

The other great success of Redemption is that it gives you plenty to do in between missions. If the world of the game existed only for the missions themselves, it'd feel a little artifical and it'd certainly feel much smaller. Instead, you can enter almost any building in the game, and most towns and settlements have mini-games to keep you busy. Poker is a big one; you can spend a lot of time either winning or losing money if you'd care to. Blackjack crops up occasionally too, and there's also some more frontier-worthy games like "Five Finger Filet," horseshoes and arm wrestling.

There's also miscellaneous challenges to keep Marston busy as he travels between locales. A Hunting challenge, for example, offers you to kill and skin three deer. Survivalist challenges allow you to collect herbs scattered around the world and Treasure Hunter challenges - by far the most exciting of the bunch - give you a simple map with a hand-drawn landmark and ask you to seek out the buried gold at the map's X.

Perhaps the best in-between-missions-diversion, however, are the bounties Marston can choose to go after, available to him in the inevitable "Wanted: Dead or Alive" posters. These bounties will place a blip on your map where you'll find the criminal surrounded by lackeys. You can kill him and be done with it, but you'll make more money if you lasso him up and bring him back to a town's Sheriff alive.

To make bounty hunting more interesting, Marston can even adopt the attire of the gang he's going after, allowing him to walk right into their hideout undetected. The various outfits don't serve much purpose outside of this feature, but it's a neat trick all the same.

Of course, eventually, you'll get tired of traveling between one town and another - whether for bounties or missions. And to combat this, Rockstar pulls off something pretty amazing. Right at the turn of the second act, Redemption asks you to leave Texas. In other words, if you want to keep the story going, you have to abandon all the people, towns and landcapes you've just spent hours getting aquatinted with. You have to go to Mexico.

It's a pretty ingenious little ploy, one which Rockstar has already used (to equal success) in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In that game, the protagonist is a gangbanger living deep within the streets of south central L.A., until the second act, that is, when he gets kidnapped and dropped off in the middle of the forests of southern California, miles away from the world he's familiar with.

It's a gimmick that works because it changes the scenery so dramatically it's almost as if you're starting a whole new game. The setting, the cast of characters, even the goal itself have all been switched, and you're left on your own to figure out what to do next.

In Redemption, Marston is allowed to leave Texas at his will - he isn't forced out quite so suddenly. But once he arrives in Mexico, the change is substantial. The familiar wooden townships of Texas give way to white washed stone and open-air markets. And the landscape itself takes a bizarre turn as the flat, open desserts of Texas give way to the red sands and huge rock formations of Mexico.

Mexico, in fact, is even more spread out than Texas. There are only a small handful of towns and they are separated by great distances and lots of mountains and canyons. This works to both the advantage and disadvantage of the game. On one hand, it creates a large and very disorienting new world to explore. On the other hand, once you're familiar with it, it does tend to take a long time to get where you need to be. This is primarily because only two towns in Mexico have anything to do in them. The rest have more mini-games and places to stay, but they don't have any missions and you can't even get any bounties from them. It's a frustrating thing, because Mexico feels so large and exploration-worthy, but you rarely have anything to do there.

The direction the plot takes in Mexico may make up for it, though. Marston, still searching for the men he's been sent to kill, ends up on both sides of a civil war. On one side is the fascist regime currently in power, and on the other are the socialist revolutionaries attempting to take control. You'll find yourself playing for teams, but not ever supporting either. The fascists, of course, are fascists. But the socialists are socialists in name only: they use inspiring rhetoric but act exactly the same as the men currently in power. It's an interesting way to look at a war: neither side can be called "the good guys," - neither side is even any different than the other.

It goes without saying, then, that eventually Marston gets betrayed, which is another plot device recycled from the Grand Theft Auto series, only this time to much less effect. Every Grand Theft Auto features a betrayal story-arc, in fact - where the guy you're working for turns on you and tries to kill you, forcing you to hunt him down in revenge. It worked amazingly well in Grand Theft Auto III, where the reversal of the mafia don was unexpected. But it continues to be in use today to diminishing returns - to the extent that you anticipate everyone you work for will turn on you eventually. It's probably time for Rockstar to retire that gimmick entirely.

That stumble aside, re-locating the action to Mexico is a brilliant way to re-invigorate the game right when it's starting to get a little repetitive. Even the game designers seem really excited by the idea. In a incredibly strange move, arriving in Mexico greets you with a full-on folk song as an interlude to the action. Where as throughout most of the game the only music is some sparse and minimal guitar plucking going on the in the background, arriving in Mexico triggers a proper three minute song with chord changes and lyrics - the whole nine yards - and it's not in a cut scene. It just starts playing once you've gotten there and start making your way to the city.

This has probably never been done before and it's a super weird thing to experience, but for some reason it works. It makes the transition into Mexico feel substantial and it represents a kind of cooling-off period between the gang-based missions in Texas and the war-based missions you're about to experience.

In another nice touch, the regular background music changes in Mexico as well, making the acoustic guitars a little more spanish-tinged and adding in some appropriately Mexican sounding horns. It's all an effort to make you feel disoriented, like a stranger left alone in a new place, and it really can't be over-estimated how successfully Rockstar pulls that feeling off.

Of course, after logging a lot more hours in Mexico, the same problem of repetition reveals itself again. Eventually you become as familiar with this new landscape as the old one, and where most games would probably call it a day here - with a game that's already around 40 hours long and spans two very different settings - Rockstar instead tries to use the same trick twice.

This is where things get really weird. Granted, there's a lot of suspension of belief in any videogame. When you play Grand Theft Auto IV, you know Manhattan is bigger than the handful of blocks recreated there. You know Jersey City isn't a little island floating next to New York. But instead of compressing a city or even state into a small area, Redemption crams in an entire country - most of the United States - in an area smaller than the game's recreation of Texas alone.

North-east of Texas, you'll reach a swampy bayou, apparently recreating Louisiana. Only about a half mile north you'll find wide open prairies, substituting for the American Midwest. And if you head west from there, you'll reach a heavily wooded area that leads to a vast mountain range, complete with eternally snow-covered base and peaks, substituting for Colorado. Remember, this snow is falling only a few miles away from the Mexican border.

It's a pretty ridiculous thing, but it's forgiven for the fact that it's so much fun. This new area, called "West Elizabeth" in the game, is the most geographically interesting setting yet. Where Texas and Mexico were wide-open and barren, West Elizabeth is teeming with flora and fauna both. Beavers wander around the rivers, herds of bison run in the plains and giant grizzlies stalk the forests.

West Elizabeth also introduces the first and only proper city in the game. It isn't obvious what city Blackwater is supposed to be a surrogate for, since the implication is you're still in the American south yet the city is on the coast. It could just be a generic city, but it's huge compared to the small towns and settlements the rest of the game takes place in. Disappointingly, most of the buildings in this huge settlement are locked to the player, but there's still a host of new areas to explore. A large bank serves as the scene for a dramatic hold-up, for example. And the local saloon plays host to high-stakes poker.

For all the interesting new ground to cover, though, Redemption doesn't spend much time in West Elizabeth and the third act is by far the game's shortest. Yet it still manages to throw the best curve-balls in a game full of them. After you've finally killed the gang leader you've spent the whole game hunting down, you expect the game to simply end. Instead, it keeps going in an extended epilogue with a host of missions that dramatically dial-down the action from the huge action set-pieces of the climax to more domestic, almost Harvest Moon-type chores. Once you return to your family's farm, you'll go back to herding cattle and scaring crows away from the corn silo.

Like many moments in Red Dead Redemption, it's profoundly weird. And this is what makes the game great. The experience of playing it is valuable for almost always doing exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. The game's ending, in fact, is perhaps it's biggest surprise. It won't be spoiled for you here, but rest assured you'll be blind-sided by it when it finally happens.

For that - for continually subverting expectations and constantly disorienting the player expecting a straight-forward shoot-em-up action game - Red Dead Redemption is easily one of the most intelligent games out there. Combine this intelligence with Rockstar's trademark solid writing, warm humor and incredible polish, and Redemption is one of the best constructed games ever made. It's an action adventure that actually has plenty of adventure. And it's one of the most affectionately written games available. It's a loving tribute to the Western genre and, most importantly, it's solid fun from start to finish. In short: it's just about perfect.

2010-07-20T11:38:00.002-04:00

As the art of music sampling has grown more sophisticated, it's taken some unexpected turns. On one hand, there's people like Greg Gillis and Kanye West, who re-purpose popular sounds as a sort of punchline - making the familiar feel fresh and unexpected in a new context. On the other, there are groups like Yawn, who seek out musical obscurities and bend them to their whims, rendering them virtually unrecognizable.

Even in that latter group there's discrepancies: some artists - like J Dilla, for example - allow this digital manipulation to sound unnatural, even disconcerting. They keep the rough edges, the clicks and harsh transitions. Yawn's use of sampling, however, sounds positively organic. They make sound collages that feel perfectly natural, like all these people and instruments are somehow congregating in the same studio at the same time.

It's a unique aesthetic for a rock band, and that's certainly what Yawn is, even as there's more percussion and harmonies than guitars. On their debut self-titled EP, Yawn is making infectious pop tunes using tribal drums, shakers, chants and, most importantly, an ear for solid vocal melodies.

It's hard to compare Yawn to any existing band. The amorphous nature of the songs recalls Bear in Heaven, albeit with brighter hooks and a stronger pop sensibility. And the strength of the overlapping melodies suggests Animal Collective, albeit louder, faster and dancier.

But there's no confusing them with anyone else. The EP opens with children laughing amongst various other sounds of indeterminate origin before the first song, Toys, properly begins to the sound of banging, overbearing drums. There are riffs here, but they're de-emphasized, buried in with the throng of noise.

And while most of the EP follows this formula of bright, densely percussion-heavy dance numbers, by far the record's best track is also the darkest and most guitar-centric. Empress introduces a heavy riff right from the beginning, practically drowning out the vocal harmonies instead of the other way around. Interestingly, though, at the half-way point the song takes a 180 degree turn, moving into major key and abandoning the dark undertones of the first-half for a sing-along refrain.

The EP closes with Midnite, the most purely dance-centric song on the record, driven by deep bass and ending with a traditional house beat and overlapping chants. The lyrics suggest inertia - "I get up in the morning and try to meet new people. I get up in the morning and try to make some things go," - but the music bounces along to a climatic finish that seems to end right when things really get going.

Which is analogous to the EP itself. At five songs, Yawn leaves you wanting more, cutting out right when it gets the most exciting. Their creative sampling, unpredictable song structures and powerful hooks could easily sustain a full-length. Here's hoping they eventually do.

2010-07-18T11:29:00.003-04:00

It's been a little over a year since New York's Twin Sister quietly released their debut EP online for free, and without even so much as a donation link. It was either a gusty move or an indifferent one, depending on how you look at it, but it seems to have paid off. Vampires with Dreaming Kids has made the rounds on blogs and even Pitchfork, all without any label support or even a way to buy the music.

In fact, Twin Sister's laissez-faire attitude toward their music extends past the EP proper - they've also posted song demos and sketches and it's all licensed under Creative Commons, meaning anyone can use it for any (non-commercial) purpose they'd like. It implies the band really is in it for the sincere love of making music, because at every opportunity to make a buck, they seem to do the opposite.

All of which would be irrelevant if the music itself wasn't so inviting. Vampires with Dreaming Kids established the band's sound immediately, casting lead singer Andrea Estella's smokey vocals against washed out yet sunny melodies in a charmingly lo-fi aesthetic. The four songs on that EP introduced a band that seemed to know exactly what it wanted to sound like and had no problem following through.

So their new EP, Color Your Life - again released as a free download on the band's website - is both familiar and a little surprising. The bright yet hazy melodies are still there, and Estella's distinctive singing style hasn't changed a bit, but Twin Sister already seems to be playing with the formula, allowing songs to spread out and move into unexpected places.

Opener The Other Side of Your Face, for instance, is seven minutes long, and it spends the first one and a half minutes of that playtime building up to the first guitar chord. From there, the song bubbles up and settles down periodically until an extended play-out sees the band seemingly improvising, finding new musical statements to pull from the song even six minutes in.

Lady Daydream is more akin to Twin Sister's earlier songs, a woozy pop number accented by Eric Cardona's slide guitar and Udbhav Gupta's persistent keyboards. It's a gorgeous song that seems lifted out of an '80s film's prom dance sequence.

The EP's middle section, Milk & Honey and All Around and Away We Go, seem likely to become the standout tracks, the former starting off slow and building to a feverish pulse and the latter practically a funk song, with a slinky bassline and a jittery, virtually unchanging lead guitar riff.

The record finishes with Phenomenons and its six minute extended intro, Galaxy Plateau, which is a droning sound collage of dissonant tones, chiming bells and multiple melodies buried in the mix. It's strange and unexpected, the kind of thing that would seem like filler if it didn't so perfectly encapsulate the atmosphere of everything Twin Sister has recorded up to this point, even as it's completely different from all of it.

It also leads superbly into Phenomenons, the dreamy closer driven by one of the band's best back beats. Like Vampires with Dreaming Kids before it, Color Your Life has cultivated a perfectly realized ambience: a gauzy, dreamlike sound that allows Estella's vocals to melt into the mix, but it's all punctuated by bright guitars and solid pop sensibility.

In that sense, it's kind of amazing this is only Twin Sister's second release, that they only have about ten songs to their name. Already they've managed to record two just about perfect records, and with the transparency they give to their music and process, it should be especially interesting to see where they go from here.

2010-04-13T00:44:00.005-04:00

What are we to make of film auteur Richard Kelly? His first film, 2001's Donnie Darko, snuck into and out of theatres without notice until it became an unexpected cult classic on dvd. And while the CGI effects certainly haven't aged well (and weren't advisable even to begin with), Darko remains one of the few "cult classics" truly worthy of the name.

An incredibly rich and layered thriller that managed to be genuinely funny, truly terrifying and endlessly watchable, Darko was a film that not only rewarded repeat viewings but practically demanded them, not only to unravel its complex mythology but also to revel in its gorgeous visuals and chilling atmosphere. It's the very definition of a Midnight Movie, which is strange because it came out in a time when the Midnight Movie was all but extinct.

Instead, it swept through college campuses and youth subculture through word-of-mouth alone, with some assistance by a viral web-presence marketers to this day would kill to duplicate.

And then? Years went by without any word of Richard Kelly. He wrote a rejected screenplay for the children's film Holes. And an accepted screenplay for a trashy B-movie about a bounty hunter (2005's Domino). It wasn't until 2006 when the world finally got a follow-up to Donnie Darko in the form of the interminable and maddeningly irrational Southland Tales.

And while Tales wasn't the worst movie ever made - and, in fact, was actually quite enjoyable for its sheer insanity alone - there was little resemblance to the little coming-of-age drama cum sci-fi thriller audiences fell in love with five years prior. The sincerity and mystery were replaced by a mess of special effects, gigantic set-pieces and a sprawling, unwieldy narrative that threw so many plot-points at the viewer it was impossible to keep them all straight.

Three years later, Richard Kelly answered the collective confusion wrought by Southland Tales with a decidedly back-to-basics sci-fi thriller very much in the vein of Donnie Darko. 2009's The Box is another period piece (this time set in the mid 1970s), again focuses on a smaller cast and a more restrained setting and it's once again under two and a half hours long.

The Box is the follow-up fans of Donnie Darko have been waiting for. And that's the problem. Despite the fact that Kelly wrote the film based on Richard Matheson's short story Button, Button, The Box often feels like Donnie Darko 2: Even Darko-er.

Besides the period setting, consider the fact that The Box again begins with a visit from a mysterious, creepy-looking stranger in the middle of the night. The Box again follows that relatively simple premise into a convoluted back-story filled with science-fiction intrigue. The Box again takes place on a holiday (Christmas instead of Halloween this time). And it again makes use of bizarre, always present background characters, hypnosis and even the fated reference book (in Darko it was called "The Philosophy of Time Travel," here it's the "Human Resource Exploitation Manual").

Narratively, Darko and The Box are quit different. They just seem to hit the same marks and the end result it that The Box is never as interesting as Darko was and still remains. Like Darko, The Box works best at its simplest. The original premise of a box that will give the owner a million dollars but kill an unknown person is pretty solid.

But when that story naturally ends, there's still 80 minutes of film left. So Kelly goes into Southland Tales mode again, digging the story deeper and deeper, making the plot stretch bigger and bigger until it simply ceases to make sense.

Kelly is still a master of the camera and he still knows how to shoot some incredible images, but the story-telling drive those images had in Darko are gone here. Kelly is constantly trying to make his film depict a Kubrikian dread, and he succeeds once (in a strange car-ride with the babysitter) but fails more often than not.

He also fails when he once again meets his old nemesis, CGI. In Darko, the cartoony CGI effects took the viewer out of the meticulously constructed mood the rest of the film spent its entire running time to achieve, but luckily, the next scene would always make up for them, immediately sucking the viewer back in. The Box simply doesn't have the compelling nature to pull this off, and the CGI here succeeds only in showing the ridiculous premises for what they really are: absolutely ridiculous.

So what are we to make of Richard Kelly? It seems, only three films into his career, he's already being written off, which would be unfair if he wasn't the one doing the writing. Kelly's first film promised what he, unfortunately, couldn't deliver. The astounding new talent and limitless potential on display in Darko hasn't been seen since. What we're instead left with are epic messes and sleepy rehashes.

And there's no one here to blame but Kelly himself. This isn't a case of a talented directed not being allowed to follow his vision. His vision led to a $15 million cluster-fuck. Instead, it seems to be a case of a director who doesn't know what to do with the talent he has.

Looking back, it seems likely Darko was so brilliant because of the very limitations Kelly had. With a budget of under $5 million, Kelly simply didn't have the funds to follow every weird whim that popped into his head. And though no one could accuse Donnie Darko of being a simple film, it was still restrained and focused. The plot was deep and complex but it made sense and it served the story.

The Box, like Southland Tales before it, seems like it's being made-up as it goes along. The first act bares little resemblance to the oddity of after-lifes and alien encounters the film becomes. And while The Box is never boring, it's never revelatory either. It's a film that feels like it's just going through the motions. So if you want to know what to make of Richard Kelly, there's your answer.

2010-03-28T16:43:00.005-04:00

Ben Stiller grew his hair out again, Chaz Tenenbaum-style, and that is something to be excited about. As the son of titular patriarch Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson's 2001 magnum opus, Stiller - for, perhaps, the first time - showed he was not only a funny character actor and competent director, he also had some serious acting chops.

Up until The Royal Tenenbaums, Stiller only came in two flavors: the down-on-his luck everyman of comedies like There's Something About Mary and the outsized caricatures of comedies like Zoolander. But in Tenenbaums, he was nuanced and guardedly vulnerable. Though the film was very much an ensemble piece, Stiller was arguably the heart.

Then, like other comedians who tried and succeeded in real acting (think Adam Sandler in Punch Drunk Love or Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Stiller cut his hair and regressed back into his comfort-zone of constantly bemused straight-men. His next starring roles, in fact, were in Duplex and Along Came Polly respectively.

Which is fine. A brother's got to stay paid. But it's a pleasant surprise to see him working with Anderson's friend and frequent collaborator Noah Baumbach in his new film, Greenberg. And just as he fully transformed into an Anderson character before, Stiller truly seems like a Baumbach character here.

As Roger Greenberg, Stiller displays a lot of characteristics of the Baumbach model. His life isn't going as he had planned, he's afraid of the future and constantly groping for a past they may have never been. He's also clinically depressed, obsessive compulsive and equal parts terrifyingly and comically short tempered.

Yet he finds sympathety in his brother's personal assistant, Florence, played with all the usual charm and casual grace of Greta Gerwig (Hannah Takes the Stairs, Nights and Weekends), with whom he shares a rocky and unlikely relationship. This personalty clash cum love connection may seem familiar, but Buambach steers clear of traditional romantic-comedy territory. He never makes it so easy for the characters to succeed, nor does he give much reason for the viewer to root for them.

Their meeting isn't cute and silly; it's awkward and vulgar. Their fights don't lead to heartfelt apologies in the rain; they're just left unresolved. And Stiller is never reformed; he remains just as difficult and unstable in the end of the film as in the beginning.

But there is a history established between Stiller and Gerwig, even if the future isn't as certain. Like most of Baumbach's films, Greenberg ends with a question mark rather than a period. "I don't believe things happen for a reason," Stiller says in one scene. "But what if this is happening for a reason?" Of all the themes Baumbach returns to, perhaps the most frequent is the concept that life never makes it obvious what's supposed to come next.

2010-03-17T12:19:00.005-04:00

Top 5: Songs about Masturbation

5. Clear Days Always: Skipping Church

A century of increasingly liberal cultural norms and numerous sexual revolutions later and masturbation is still taboo. It's probably not surprising; There are no shortages of people willing to voice their concerns on women's rights and homosexuals' rights, but its hard to imagine too many people would be willing to march in the Masturbation parade. That's not a euphemism, by the way - just an analogy.

Still, it's generally accepted wisdom that everybody does it, so taboo or not, masturbation shows up occasionally in popular culture, and perhaps no where is that more evident than in popular music.

And while masturbation is usually a pretty rare topic in an artist's repertoire, for singer songwriter Levi Bailey, it's practically a muse. In his output as Clear Days Always, Bailey revels in taboos, but none so much as "flogging the dolphin," as he would say. In fact, it's hard to find a song where he doesn't make at least a passing reference to it.

The self-depreciating to the point of masochistic Bailey is no stranger to representing himself in the most unflattering way possible, so while there's literally entire albums worth of material to choose from, perhaps the purest expression of his masturbatory guilt comes on "Skipping Church" from his Friction Records debut Ten Fingers: Five Yours, Five Mine.

On this folky little acoustic-pop tune, Bailey admits he has "so many filthy urges sometimes I can barely restrain myself" and owns up to what he's really doing while the rest of his family is at Sunday Mass.

So much nudity and girls turned inside out and there I am, in the middle of it all, skipping church. I can not wash my hands again. This time I'm leaving the light on.

4. Generation X: Dancing with Myself

Meanwhile, in another state of mind and another musical universe altogether, Generation X's lead singer (and underestimated punk rocker in his own right) Billy Idol has no guilty conscious at all regarding his habits of self-love. Indeed, while Idol admits "if I had the chance, I'd ask the world to dance," he also doesn't overlook the fact that sometimes you have to dance and you're the only one around.

"Dancing With Myself" proved such a big hit for Generation X - and later Idol on his own - it ended up being covered by a legion of other bishop boppers, including (no joke) Kids Incorporated and Gonzo from the Muppets. To be fair, Idol claims to this day the song isn't about masturbation and that there's no metaphor being employed at all. But come on. Can he seriously say the line "I wait so long for my love vibration" is referring to dancing? Who does he think he's talking to? Kids Incorporated?

When there's no one else in sight in the crowded lonely night… If I looked all over the world and there's every type of girl, but your empty eyes seem to pass me by, leave me dancing with myself.

3. Violent Femmes: Blister in the Sun

The Violent Femmes are an important band to a lot of people (and a lot of musicians) but to most of the world they are the one-hit-wonder responsible for an infectiously jangly pop-rock song that's been used in countless film scores and chain supermarket adverts. All of which makes it especially weird that said one-hit happens to be about an apparent chronic masturbator.

Like Bailey, the Femmes' Gordon Gano describes a masturbation scenario that isn't just unromantic, it isn't even fun. The protagonist in this story masturbates at the expense of his lover and doesn't even seem to want to, but pleas to be allowed to continue anyway.

It a strange twist of fate, this story happened to be told over a sunny, upbeat melody, a brilliant break down and one of the catchiest choruses ever written. So corporations in the dark to this day let their ad-men pull one over on them and try to convince people to buy their peanut butter, generic clothing lines and pharmaceuticals with a tune about the old five knuckle shuffle.

Body and beats, I stain my sheets - I don't even know why. My girlfriend - she's at the end - she is starting to cry. Let me go on like I blister in the sun. Big hands, I know you're the one.

2. Devo: Praying Hands

Like the Violent Femmes, Devo is a band wildly under appreciated. Those in the know recognize them as one of the most influential and entertaining acts of the late '70s and early '80s art-punk movement, but to the world at large they are the guys who wore flower pots on their heads ("Energy Domes," in all actuality) and recorded "Whip It."

Before that single would bring them into the international conscious, however, Devo were simply five guys who recorded one of most essential albums in rock history, 1978's Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!. This debut LP introduced the world to the band's unique philosophy (and namesake) - the concept that instead of evolving, humanity has reached a point where it is actually regressing, or de-evolving, into a new sub-species.

So perhaps it makes sense that one of their earliest songs would be about masturbation. What could be more de-evolutionary? An entirely selfish exercise in narcissism that neither furthers the species nor advances consciousness in any way. Still, unlike Bailey or Gano, Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh doesn't really seem to be berating the act in "Praying Hands." In his typically up-beat pseudo-surf-rock number, Mothersbaugh seems more inclined to just go over the basics.

You got your left hand. You got your right hand. Your left hand's diddling while your right hand goes to work. You got both hands. You got praying hands.

1. Animal Collective: Guys Eyes

Animal Collective has been dealing in beautiful, enveloping ambiance for years now, but on 2009's Merriweather Post Pavilion the quartet finally let some strong song structures slip into their swirling, intertwining melodies. Some fans bemoaned the band was "going pop" and they may have been right. But that isn't a knock against them by any means. In retrospect, it seemed perfectly natural for a group with an incredibly rich and distinct style to allow that style, now eight albums strong, to craft some powerful pop music.

So it was that Pavilion became the Collective's most successful and celebrated release to date, and for good reason. For literally the entirety of the album's nearly hour long running time, Pavilion crafts and maintains an atmosphere of building tensions and resolutions, engrossing melodies and captivating sound experiments. The album is so dreamlike, in fact, it's easy to lose (or simply ignore) the meanings of the words Avey Tare and Panda Bear are singing, their harmonies melting into the perfectly crafted sound structures of the songs.

Listen closely to album stand out "Guys Eyes," however, and you'll find a perhaps surprising meaning. Yes, it's a masturbation song, but it's also probably the sweetest and most romantic rumination on the subject in pop music history.

Unlike Bailey, Idol, Gano and Mothersbaugh, Tare doesn't paint masturbation as a vulgar, selfish act. To him, it's the exact opposite. "I really want to show to my girl that I need her," he sings, so instead of looking for an affair, he decides to "keep it locked" and "purge all the urges that I have and keep them for you."

That means killing a kitten, admittedly, but leave it to one of the most haunting bands in modern rock to give the act a new, more sentimental meaning. Maybe Devo was wrong. Maybe we're evolving after all.

I really want to do just what my body wants to. I really want to do just what my body needs to. … So I used my mind and I used my hand. It was what I want to do.

2010-02-23T10:59:00.004-05:00

Some films exist solely as a delivery system for their visuals, which is fine as long as they can keep up the momentum those visuals create. In Henry Selick's Coraline, however, his innovative, instantly recognizable and often beautiful animation tends to be over powered by the incredible dullness of the plot.

It all starts out quite promising. Coraline, a young girl from Pontiac, has moved to an old house stuck in a seemingly perpetual rain storm with her writer parents and quickly grows bored of having no friends, nowhere to go and no luck attracting attention from her busy mother and father.

Then she finds a small door which acts as a portal into an alternate dimension where everything is perfect. Her cheerful "Other Mother" is always cooking delicious food, her "Other Father" flys her around a magical garden, and even the other tenants in the house have more exciting alter egos.

Trapped in an eternal twilight, this alternate universe is certainly the most exciting thing about Coraline. It's a magical place, but it's also too perfect, lending a subtle eeriness to every scene that takes place there which climaxes when the Other Mother makes Coraline an offer to stay there forever.

But right when Coraline gets most interesting, the entire plot devolves and everything that made the first half of the film so appealing unravels into what feels like a videogame fetch quest.

The Other Mother turns out to be an illusion - she's actually the haggard old witch you've seen in just about every Disney film ever made - and it instantly destroys all her initial creepiness and charm. Coraline's real parents are trapped in the fantasy universe and she has to rescue them by collecting the souls of three ghosts. When she finds the first, a character literally says the line, "Thanks, lady, but there's two more left," which, as far as plot points go, is on par with, "Thank you, Mario, but our princess is in another castle."

Coraline also has a nasty habit of outright stealing elements from better movies. The parallel world is very similar to Alice's Wonderland, not only in its down the rabbit hole façade, but also in its animal-like fauna, eccentric inhabitants and talking cat that has a habit of disappearing while speaking. Seriously.

Even the way Coraline gets to this other dimension is suspect. There's a tiny door hidden behind some boxes in her house that leads to a long tunnel she can only pass by crawling through. It looks and acts exactly like an identical door from Being John Malkovich. For a fantasy film, Coraline is pretty short on new fantasies.

But the first half of the film really works, even with the reheated gimmicks. It's suitably eerie, uses the Wonderland conceit in an original way and has the visuals to seal the deal - which is why it's such a shame the film becomes so tedious and uninspired in it's second half.

Instead of letting the perfect world disintegrate, an idea that's only hinted at here, Coraline simply becomes an errand runner, the villain simply becomes a cliché, and the film simply becomes a bore. It's undoubtedly a beautiful picture throughout, but the animation team deserves better than the second rate story it got stuck with.

2010-01-21T20:14:00.010-05:00

Back in the heady days of 2004, DJ Danger Mouse made a name for himself by combining the a cappellas from Jay-Z's Black Album with the music of the Beatles' self-titled, more commonly known as "the White Album." The Grey Album, as it came to be known, gained a massive amount of notoriety, largely because EMI saw the sampling of the Beatles' seminal masterpiece as a cardinal sin worthy of the maximum punishment by law, but the beats themselves weren't anything exceptional beyond the initial pun.

These days, sampling has become so common-place that no one even bats an eye when someone like Gregg "Girl Talk" Gillis crafts entire symphonies out of Top 40 hits, but the art form has grown by leaps and bounds, and there's perhaps no better example then Tom Caruana's Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers.

Chambers again combines lush Beatles' samples with hip-hop a cappellas, but this time, arguably the greatest rock band of all time is soundtracking arguably the greatest hip-hop group: Shaolin's own Wu-Tang Clan. And the beats aren't just culled from the Beatles' own catalogue. There's extensive and creative use of covers, muzak renditions, symphonic compositions and re-appropriated news interviews and fan frenzies. The results are a work that references the mythologies of two venerable institutions from two very different musical genres and eras at once.

They're also immensely listenable. The sort of laissez-faire acceptance of sampling today means Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers won't receive nearly as much attention as the far inferior Grey Album from six years prior, but if it's a just world, it'll still end up being the sleeper sensation of 2010. It's seriously that good.

The early brilliance of combining The Beatles' You Never Give Me Your Money with Ol' Dirty Bastard's club banger Got Your Money suggest the album's going to peak early, when it turns out to be merely the tip of the iceberg.

Some other highlights: Dirty harmonizing with John and Paul on the album centerpiece Wu Vs. Beatles, Ghostface Killah's escape anthem Run becoming a laid-back funk groove and late-period Wu hit Uzi (Pinky Ring) converted into a veritable Beatles showcase, challenging even the biggest Beatlemaniacs to name every sample participating.

Unlike the Grey Album, which let a gimmick carry it to fame, Chambers is virtually overflowing with innovation, hiding the world's most famous pop songs among elaborate compositions that somehow make four lads from Liverpool sound like they recorded music for the explicit purpose of having nine MCs from Staten Island spit over it thirty years later.

It's a rich, inviting work that rewards fandom of either group (and especially both) and practically demands repeat listenings, if not in attempt to name each tune in use then to enjoy their new lives as pitch-perfect hip-hop hooks.

It's not unlikely Caruana created Chambers in a bid to publicize his own beat-making skills and get his name to go viral online. What he instead, perhaps inadvertently, did was create the most essential hip-hop album in recent memory. So everyone wins.

~~Listen and download Enter the Magical Mystery Chambers for free at BandCamp.~~

Update: The album has already been taken off BandCamp, however, you can now download it from MediaFire.

2009-10-04T20:59:00.003-04:00

The problem with Michael Moore is that he's become too famous. Not too famous for his career, of course. As the most successful documentarian in the history of movie making, Moore still recieves more critical recognition and box office numbers than anyone else in the genre. But he has become too famous for his films to reach their intended audiences. Like him or not, the fact is you already have an opinion of Michael Moore. And though he's seen by many as a champion for the people, constantly defending the rights of the poor, the weak and the forgotten against the evils and everyday hypocrisies of capitalism, there's just as many who view him as a snarky, self-important blowhard whose ideas are dangerous for the economy and the country as a whole.

To be fair, Moore had a hand in making people hate him. One of his most famous films, Farenheit 9/11, has a premise that boils down to, "Look how stupid the president of our country is." And there's a valid argument to be made there, because his stupidity led to disastrous wars in the middle east and thousands of American lives lost in their name. Still, it isn't the best way to make friends on the right.

Of course, most of Moore's films ignore politics altogether and discuss issues only as they affect the average citizen. Consider something like Downsize This, which points out the unfair way blue collar workers are allowed to be abandoned by companies they've been loyal to for years or even decades. Or Moore's last effort, Sicko, the premise of which is essentially, "People should not be allowed to suffer and die from an inability to recieve medical care, especially if those people are already covered by medical insurance."

You would think such a unitarian and humanist view point would be embraced by everyone, no matter what their political leanings. But look no further than the current healthcare debate - which, by the way, Moore himself had no small part in starting - to see that that simply isn't true. It seems anything Moore says will be met with respect and rage both, regardless of what he's actually saying.

So, reasons Moore, why not go for broke and say precisely what's wrong with this country and modern society as a whole? And thus, we have Capitalism: A Love Story. The premise? Capitalism is an inherently evil, anachronistic and out of control system that is beyond repair and, therefore, must be destroyed. It's essentially saying that everything the conservative right believes in is wrong, although that's not to say it's a Democractic film any more than it is a Republican one. In fact, Democrats receive some of the film's harshest criticisms.

In Capitalism, Moore is offering a nonpartisan middle finger to the government, both left and right, who either argue for the ability of capitalism to bypass regulation publicly (Republicans) or who simply sign the checks in private (Democrats). They're both wrong, argues Moore, and it's absurd to continue worshipping at the shrine of an economic system that can charitably be described as broken, and less charitably described as a sin - fundamentally opposed to the teachings of every major religion.

But he only hints at another option. He repeatedly calls for "democracy", but what he's really talking about is socialism - which is as democratic as any economic system could ever be - and if we can't even socialize something as simple and essential as health care, how are we ever going to socialize the entire political and economic systems of America? It's a problem Moore chooses not to address, probably because it's such a losing battle there's really no point in even fighting it.

As a film, Capitalism is decidely another Michael Moore movie. Which is fine. He should do what he does best and, this late in the game, veering wildly off course would only seem like a cop-out. So expect lots of archived footage and personal stories told under Moore's narration. But there is an absence of the now infamous Michael Moore "stunt", and the ones that made it in (like attempting to make a citizen arrest of the CEOs of the largest banking corporations) probably should have been left out. They don't sell his point nearly as well as the true stories he tells.

And those stories do sell his point, incredibly well and in heartbreaking detail. But does Capitalism succeed as a rallying call? That still remains to be seen. It's an incredibly effective film: It explains and backs up its hypothesis well and it's entertaining in the process. But the film ends in what seems to be a call to arms, directly addressing the viewer to take action in the citizen revolt Moore seems to think is soon coming.

And maybe he's right. Perhaps Capitalism will pick up speed, people will see it and recommend it to their friends, families and co-workers and before too long a sizable portion of the population will be angry. Maybe all these angry people will quit their jobs and occupy their days instead by throwing trash cans through shop fronts and burning down chain coffee shops. Maybe the capitalist system we've had since the beginning of this country will be dismantled by the people, replaced instead with a socialist system so democratic and equal it ressurects Karl Marx from the dead like an even bushier-bearded Jesus.

Or maybe, the biggest reaction this film will see is a crowd of already like-minded moviegoers nodding their heads in agreement, and then going back to work at their minimum wage jobs, further inflating the stocks and salaries of multi-national corporate CEOs. Moore deserves credit for trying, but if this is the revolution, it's just not going to cut it.

2008-11-23T11:59:00.002-05:00

It'd be next to impossible to criticize Charlie Kaufman's new film 'Synecdoche, New York' in any traditional sense because 'Synecdoche' isn't a film in the traditional sense at all. By this point in his career, Kaufman is known, adored, even, for scripts that seem on the verge of self-imploding, but the difference here is that there was a mechanism carefully built into his previous scripts (for beloved films like 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind') that revealed their chaos to be, in actuality, carefully controlled all along. 'Synecdoche' has no such mechanism, no clever symmetry revealed in the final act that pulls everything together. It is a film that seems erratic, arbitrary and in disarray. It is a film that seeks to accurately emulate life.

That is, not coincidentally, also the aim of the film's protagonist, played with usual brilliance by Philip Seymour Hoffman. So intent is Hoffman on creating an honest and truthful masterwork that he stages a play of his life in real-time, in life-size scale, to the extent that the fiction becomes the reality itself. It's essentially Woody Allen's 'Stardust Memories' taken to its logical (and most improbable) conclusion.

But there's a lot more going on in 'Synecdoche' and, as with life, the summarization of all this activity would be a tedious and pointless procedure. Events happen in Hoffman's life that are impossible and life-changing, and they happen in the blink of an eye while something equally as important (or unimportant) is happening elsewhere. It's a plot that was devised to get the viewer lost and Kaufman doesn't seem interested in helping us find our way out. As one of Hoffman's love interests tells him, "It's up to each of us to figure out our own life."

And in the act of emulating the disorder of life, 'Synecdoche' excels, but as a film it's more difficult to judge. Certainly, no one will walk away from it without an opinion. In a industry where the art of filmmaking had been reduced to a formula optimized for commercial performance that leaves its customers expecting and ready to shrug when the lights come up, it's at least admirable to see a film that demands a strong reaction from its viewers, even if that reaction is strongly negative.

And while it's inevitable many people will hate the film, it also seems sure to make a lot of people fall in love with it. It's dark and melancholic but it's also surreal and playful and frequently hilarious. Even at its most incomprehensible, the film never ceases to be interesting and its not-so-big finish, even without any clever reveal, makes a powerful (and inevitable) statement about morality, love, loss, regret and the creative process.

'Synecdoche' is also Kaufman's first attempt at directing a script himself and though he pulls such an ambitious project off commendably, it's hard not to wonder what this film would have looked like had it been directed by Spike Jonze, as originally planned, or, perhaps more interestingly, Michel Gondry. This exhaustible premise of this film seems tailor-fit to Gondry's signature surrealist visual style and, had he been on-board, he surely would have reigned in some of the more impenetrable aspects of the script in a way Kaufman never could or would have wanted to.

But that's not to say 'Synecdoche' is an imperfect or flawed film. As an industry and as an audience, we need films like this, even if their ambitions are too big for their own good. Life, occasionally, deserves to be commented on without agenda or market research. If nothing else, Kaufman has found what he was looking for in the making of his film: the honest expression of a man whose vision was untainted by commercialization or digestibility. That is an increasingly rare commodity in cinema as a whole, and one that deserves, at the very least, a measure or respect.

2008-06-19T11:08:00.003-04:00

Though it isn't quite clear how it happened, or why, it's certainly obvious that it did happen: American audiences have acquired a taste for blood. A new sub-genre of the horror industry has materialized and instantly proven itself incredibly lucrative. Admirers might call it Grindhouse, but detractors are more likely to use another term: "Torture Porn".

Whatever you choose to call it, it's a big seller. Films like Eli Roth's 'Hostel' and James Wan's 'Saw' have grossed millions at the box office and spawned more than their fair share of sequels and imitators alike. The genre is essentially the gimp scene in 'Pulp Fiction' extended to about two hours: "Normal" people accidentally happen upon some sadistic serial killers and their desire to torture their victims before they die, the more cruel and unusual the better.

If the formula sounds familiar, that's because it is. The Grindhouse scene takes its cue from the type of film that would play in its namesake, especially during the 1970s. Films like 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' serve as a direct influence, though their once controversial brutality seem almost quaint in comparison.

Today, there's a new entry in the catalogue: Michael Haneke's 'Funny Games', which matches all the genre specifications (normal people, sadistic predators and the interminable lengths the latter goes to kill the former) but it doesn't quite fit in with the rest of this ubiquitous movie movement.

For one thing, 'Games' is attempting to appeal to a different audience: the art-house crowd (it stars such indie-film favorites as Michael Pitt, Naomi Watts and Tim Roth). Secondly, there's a pointed objective to the violence. 'Funny Games' is a Grindhouse movie about Grindhouse movies.

This is actually Haneke's second 'Funny Games'- the American remake of his 1997 Austrian film of the same name- and the timing for a revisit couldn't be better. Today, more than ever, the message of 'Games' is extraordinarily relevant. The violence in film even only 10 years ago hardly compares to the savage sadism prevalent in American horror today.

And in watching 'Funny Games', the film forces you to ask yourself why you find torture entertaining. As two wealthy, attractive and absurdly polite young men (played by Pitt and Brady Corbert) abuse and assault a family on vacation in their summer home (Roth, Watts and 12-year-old Devon Gearhart), they make it clear early on that their actions are meaningless. They have no other intentions than to torture their victims (both mentally and physically) and eventually kill them.

The film around them, however, isn't so straightforward. Every violent action onscreen begs the question of whether or not it can be considered entertainment, or art, or purposeful in any way. It's a point made explicitly clear when Pitt breaks the fourth wall, looks directly into the camera and asks the viewers watching, "What about you? Do you think it's enough yet?"

The highly stylized 'Games' is superbly shot and acted, but it may have a hard time finding an audience. It's too slow and weighty to appeal to the Grindhouse crowd it openly inquires of but it might also feature too much motiveless violence for the art theatre camp it aims to reach.

But here's to hoping 'Funny Games' eventually finds an audience of its own. It's at times funny, suspenseful and provocative- sometimes all three at once. A film this profoundly superficial (or vice-versa) deserves all the attention it gets, from whoever is willing to give it.

2008-06-07T14:43:00.001-04:00

"The Protector" is a terrible film. That's the fact of the matter and however much the film tries to distract you from this simple truth, it's still painfully obvious every time the fists stop flying. The acting is laughable and the atrocious over-dubbing makes it even worse, the plot is so absurd, even by kung-fu standards, that it teeters dangerously on the edge of self-parody and despite consistently accomplished photography, the film is constantly trying to take you out of the mood with disastrous dialogue and music that wouldn't pass in a Sega Genesis game.

However, despite all of its obvious flaws and a complete disregard for reality, "The Protector" is still essential viewing for anyone that remembers being enchanted by the action films of yesterday, whether weaned on the '70s kung-fu of old or the more recent Jackie Chan and Jet Li versions of it.

It stars Tony Jaa, who picks up the torch Chan, an obvious influence, dropped many years ago and holds it higher than Chan ever has, even in the height of his drunken-fighting days. Jaa is already a star in his native Thailand and he should be one here, too. His acrobatics are jaw-droppingly spectacular and they're made even more impressive with the casual smoothness in which he performs them. Perhaps most important of all, his stunts feel genuinely dangerous. You can't help but constantly fear for Jaa's life as you watch "The Protector" because, even if all the props are fake and the chairs and tables are built to break, you watch him do things in the film that you know, with a single misstep, could put an end to his action film credits for good.

There's one scene in particular where the evil henchmen gives a signal and an X-Games ready group of roller-bladers and BMX riders appear, apparently from right out of thin air, doing stunts even as they're trying to attack Jaa. The ridiculousness of somebody trying to fight another human being by doing tail-whips over them can be overlooked because in the climax of the scene, while Jaa is trying to outrun an ATV, he runs up a window pane and flips over the vehicle right as it crashes through the glass.

This is the sort of thing Jaa does consistently: he takes an arbitrary aspect of his environment- a window pane, a broken down bus, a guardrail- and he turns it into something dangerous: a tool with which to outsmart and out-perform his enemies. That he does it all in faded blue, high-top Chuck Taylors and a red neckerchief makes it all that much better.

Another scene involved Jaa fighting his way up several levels of some sort of casino/ restaurant/ generic-bad-guy-hangout. His skillful acrobatics are matched only by the remarkable camerawork which somehow keeps up with all of his leaps into windows and breaking-down of doors, sometimes leading the action and sometimes following but always capturing the beautifully choreographed fights in a way that lets your forget you're watching a film at all. This alone makes the scene unforgettable- then you realize that the four-minutes-long sequence was recorded in one, uninterrupted take- at which point it becomes absolutely ridiculous.

So, yes- despite the atrocious plot line and inexcusable ignorance for the workings of the real world, "The Protector" is still phenomenal because it features perhaps the most exciting action sequences ever put to film. The only other movie that even comes close ("Drunken Master" itself excluded) is the now 30-year old "Warriors", and after watching "Protector", seeing Swan throw Punks into ceramic restroom sinks no longer seems quite as brutal as it used to.

Still, "The Protector" is probably best viewed on a DVD with the television on mute so you can skip the painful exposition and supplant the original score with music of your own choosing, but here's to hoping this mess of a movie makes Jaa famous enough to score a leading role in a real film; a good film. The action genre as a whole depends on it.

2008-05-01T23:51:00.002-04:00

It is in our cities and our countrysides. Our offices and our homes. Our corporate displays of capitalism and our underground uprisings of art. It is ubiquitous but unnoticed. Conventional but insurrectionist. Sexy but sterile. It is that which holds us together yet also pushes us apart. It is a font called Helvetica.

Or at least, that's the argument made by the documentary of the same name, which presents the nearly 50-year-old font as both a unifier and divider, not only in the realm of graphic design but in everything from politics to philosophy.

The film isn't too concerned with how it happened, but rather why, so those expecting a thorough history in typography or design will be disappointed. Instead, a brief backstory on Helvetica (or Neue Haas Grotesk, as it was originally named) quickly gets out of the way for an army of talking heads to explain why they either love or hate the polarizing font.

Through their rants and raves, even the most design-illiterate will get a feel for what makes Helvetica special: the unassuming nature that neither suggests or expresses. The irony, of course, is that it's the font's neutrality that makes people so adamant of their opinions on it.

The documentary gives equal time to the designers who believe Helvetica is the perfection of typography as a whole (clean, concise and virtually unimprovable) and those who rebelled against Helvetica's rebellion (the idea that complicated is good, bucking legibility for originality, creativity and innovation).

Of course, neither camp is right, and even as they argue whether Helvetica is the font of socialism or capitalism, imagination or idleness, beauty or boredom, you can't help but find humor in the fact that such unyielding conviction is coming from, of all things, a humble typeset.

But the film makes its case effectively, showcasing precisely how omnipresent and important the font really is. It represents everything from the biggest of corporate entities to independent artists, from entire cities to an individual's fashion sense.

And yet, for a film so design-minded, "Helvetica" isn't much to look at. The shots of all these logos and street signs aren't particularly interesting on their own, though the sometimes unsexy type-talk is broken up with consistently excellent music.

Unsurprisingly, it's the art that steals the show. Prints both classic and current reveal just how many different emotions one font can evoke, and through them, the past 50 years of design, from modernism to post-modernism, art deco to grunge, are identified and examined as revolutions in not just design, but western culture itself.

"Helvetica" is far more captivating than any film about a font has any right to be. Of course, describing Helvetica as simply a font is under-serving it- it's a movement in and of itself- and it's impossible to walk away from this documentary without gaining a new knowledge and appreciation for the visual communication of our world as a whole. Like it's subject matter, "Helvetica" attempts to remain neutral, but chances are by the time the credits roll (guess which font they're in), you'll find yourself obstinately taking a side.

2008-04-19T15:47:00.003-04:00

It started in an Ontarian basement early 2005. In the wake of a previous disbanding, four friends decided to regroup as a new band, play a few shows and then quietly disappear come Autumn, when the members would go their separate ways for school and other obligations. Their relentless, international touring schedule, major festival and TV appearances and break-neck rise to indie-rock stardom were never part of the plan. For Tokyo Police Club, fame was accidental.

The first breakthrough came in the form of an invitation to play the Montreal Pop Festival. Though still largely unknown, the band had gained a small following playing local clubs and distributing music from their MySpace profile. The festival appearance instantly grabbed the attention of local label Paperbag Records, who convinced the members to focus on making the band a full time engagement and record their debut EP, “A Lesson in Crime”.

“Crime” was barely released before it ended up in the hands of editors at Pitchfork and Sterogum, influential online publications that propelled the band into the international music zeitgeist. Backed by support form the online community (including several thousand MySpace “friends”), Tokyo Police Club landed at several of the industry’s biggest festivals, most notably Coachella in California, Lollapalooza in Chicago and Glastonbury in England.

What happened? How had a summer band inspired more by boredom than anything else become an international sensation?

Despite an unconventional rise to popularity, Tokyo Police Club isn’t tethered to a catchy gimmick like fellow blog-backed buzz-bands Times New Viking or Vampire Weekend. Their music is more universally appealing: straight forward pop-rock, upbeat tempos and intelligent hooks.

Bassist Dave Monks leads the band with expressively fuzzy bass lines. Drummer Greg Alson pushes them forward with difficult but still danceable beats. Guitarist Josh Hook drives up the intensity with angular and abrasive riffs and keyboardist Graham Wright fills out the sound with glimmering synths.

Monks also fronts the band with a very specific singing style. His vocals are weak and there’s not much of a range to mention, but they’re perfect for the band, accurately portraying the paranoia of his dystopian-future lyrics without taking the spotlight away from the music itself.

But perhaps the most telling display of the band’s songwriting ability comes with the absence of the band itself.

During this year’s South by Southwest, a scheduled Tokyo Police Club show unexpectedly became a solo-acoustic set when a family emergency left Monks without a complete band for the remainder of the festival. It’d be easy to accuse the band of relying on math-rock beats and dance-inspired synths, tambourines and handclaps to pad hollow song structures, but Monks defiantly proved the accusation baseless.

Even the most manic songs in Tokyo Police Club’s program work when stripped down to their most basic elements of six-string chords and Monk’s lyrics. They worked so well, in fact, that had you not recognized Monks sitting alone on the tented Free Yr Radio stage, you could easily mistake him for being the next indie-folk star in the vein of M. Ward or Elliot Smith.

Instead of the apocalyptic-dance-party the Tokyo Police Club recordings suggest, Monks’ acoustic renditions lent themselves to a different kind of eeriness entirely. Inexplicably, his lamentations on robots and science-fiction fantasies become positively heart-felt heard over the strum of an acoustic guitar, pulling the undertones of heartbreak and isolation into the forefront. Of course, they were there all along, but hearing them out of their intended context gave them new weight, a testament to the complexity of the songs.

Now with two EPs under their belt, Tokyo Police Club is ready to jump into the art of the Long Playing record album with “Elephant Shell”, set to release April 22nd. Instead of relying on the success of their previous successes, “Elephant Shell” features 11 new tracks, though they match the tone and character of previous efforts “A Lesson in Crime” and “Smith”.

The first widely distributed song, “In a Cave”, follows the group’s most popular track thus far, “Nature of the Experiment”, with another unwieldy bass line guiding a fast paced guitar riff. “Tessellate” brings a collegiate charm to the garage inspired pop-rock of bands like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. And the debut single proper, “Your English is Good”, sees the band at perhaps their most light-hearted, with a sing-a-long refrain over a breezy bass.

In a music landscape where everyone is grasping for attention, with increasingly complicated efforts for a place in an increasingly crowded industry, it’s nice to see a band that isn’t trying to change the world. Tokyo Police Club doesn’t want to invent a new subgenre, or blend obscure styles in some kind of contrived hybrid of sounds. Their career began with the modest intention of having fun and “Elephant Shell” proves they’ve met that objective.

2008-04-05T09:50:00.000-04:00

Look past the eccentric visuals and unconventional editing and "Chicago 10" is, at its core, a documentary- but only in the most lax sense of the word. The new film from director Brett Morgen details the infamous riots surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the ensuing prosecution of the eight men accused of inciting them, but it doesn't do so in any sort of linear or logical narration. Instead, the chronology of the events is taken apart and re-assembled in a kaleidoscope of music, speech and spectacle that's erratic, disorienting and unequivocally brilliant at portraying the chaotic and violent reality of the situation.

For the unversed: the riots were the culmination of mostly-peaceful protests by two anti-war movements, the Yippies and the Mobe, who came to Chicago during the Convention in opposition of the U.S. occupation of Vietnam. What was planned as a non-violent, non-aggressive "Festival of Life" in Lincoln Park quickly escalated with the arrival of armed officers, barbed-wire laden Jeeps and Chicago mayor Richard Daley's notorious "shoot to kill" order.

"Chicago 10" relates the events surrounding the violence, but in lieu of a sequential retelling padded with talking heads and a foreboding narrator, the film goes for urgency over accuracy, recounting both the riots themselves and the Chicago Seven trial (which occurred nearly a year later) simultaneously.

A lot of attention for the film has been given to the animated re-enactment of that trial, in which actors like Hank Azaria and Mark Ruffalo voice motion-capture CGI caricatures of the defendants in dialogue based on the trial's actual transcripts. The more traditional cell-shaded animation works better, but the vaguely out-of-date-video-game look appropriately visualizes the surrealism of a court room that quickly spirals out of control.

The real highlight, though, is the astounding accumulation of archival footage used to present the riots themselves. Collected over three years of vault digging, this footage offers the most raw and unfettered look at the violence yet, and it isn't easy to watch. "Chicago 10" wears its bias on it's sleeve, but it's hard to sympathize with the police when every brawl seems to begin and end with a group of police clubbing a passive demonstrator, leaving a fleeing throng of blood soaked bodies in their wake. By the end of the Convention, even the most conservative and authoritarian would have difficulty arguing with the beaten and bloodied masses and their frequent accusations of fascism.

It's no coincidence "Chicago 10" is being released now, 40 years after the Convention took place. Plenty has been said of the similarity between the war in Vietnam and the current quagmire in Iraq, and now with a tumultuous contest for the Democratic nomination, the similarities between 1968 and 2008 are only building.

But the film makers restrain from offering much in the form of review or retrospect, and instead make the events of '68 feel urgent and current, building the intensity with impassioned speeches and modern music. The music, in fact, is the film's only misstep (a movie about the '68 Democratic National Convention and the only MC5 song is a Rage Against the Machine cover?), but it can be forgiven for attempting to drive home the point that the people have the ability to positively influence their government, as well as draw attention to its failures.

That's not to say getting beaten by the police is the best way to do it, but the Chicago Ten, however hurt in the process, proved it could be done. When mayor Daley was asked by a reporter if it'd be a good convention, the irony is obvious as he optimistically responds, "The best ever held!" But looking back, maybe he was right after all.

2008-03-30T14:49:00.003-04:00

In October of 2006, an African-music oriented audioblog called Benn Loxo du Taccu posted an MP3 of “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa”, a song by a virtually unknown New York City band called Vampire Weekend that blended African riffs and rhythms with Western pop and rock. Six months later, the same band was featured in a post on the music news site Stereogum and within ten months of that post, Vampire Weekend secured appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, a #27 spot on Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Songs of 2007 and the cover and "Best New Band" status from Spin, all before releasing a debut album.

Their breakneck rise to fame came not from a catchy single, heavy radio play or a relentless touring schedule; it came from sending homemade CD-Rs of their demo to blogs like Benn Loxo and Stereogum, and their strategy worked. They are without a doubt the hottest, most buzzed about band of the year so far, but their atypical surge in popularity begs the question: how long can such premature interest last?

In the now quaint and antiquated time before blogs and rampant MP3 sharing (call it the 1990s), a band had to build a fan base gradually through word-of-mouth, independent radio, exposure in Xeroxed 'zines and near constant touring. This approach of worming into the pop-culture zeitgeist was much less efficient, much more difficult and infinitely slower, but it usually led to a level of staying power an MP3 file can never compare to. The problem with fame- in a time when it's available to anyone with a MySpace profile and a CD burner built in their laptop- is that it's much less reliable, for both the bands themselves and the fans.

It's because of this new insecurity of celebrity a music festival like Austin's South by Southwest becomes immensely important. Only time will tell how long a band's appeal will remain in tact, but for now, SXSW offers the perfect context to view all the new and note-worthy bands that spring into popularity from music sites and blog posts: an environment where they are forced to compete for attention with each other.

The 2008 SXSW Music Conference featured over 1500 artists on 72 stages throughout the city, and while some of those bands are industry main-stays like R.E.M. and Yo La Tengo, most are much greener, using the festival as a means to prove themselves. Names like Yeasayer and Genghis Tron may not mean much to someone who doesn't bother with online journalism, but they're all hoping SXSW will help propel them into the (admittedly dim) spotlight of independent music.

Consider Times New Viking, the Columbus, Ohio trio whose heavily circulated lo-fi recordings owes their popularity more to the band's MySpace page than any official web or label presence (the band currently doesn't have a website at all and they were two albums into their career before signing with independent label Matador). Despite frequently glowing reviews (from such influential publications as Pitchfork and The Village Voice), the band failed to ignite much excitement during SXSW, prompting The A.V. Club to write "the emperor has no clothes... he's running... down the street and hiding behind feedback and shrill attitude," adding: "They're just not very good".

Not as easily written off was the experimental-punk duo No Age from Los Angeles, who were recently featured in a New Yorker profile that stated, "The more... you hear, the more logical it seems that such a goofy and chaotic band would attract a loyal following." And their following was certainly visible during SXSW, where 6th Street saw plenty of the band's instantly recognizable t-shirts featuring big, bold letters in rainbow colors.

The shows themselves were somewhat of a mixed bag. They weren't as crowded as a band so hyped would lead you to believe, but as with their music, where such a big noise comes from a mere two people, they made the most of what they had. Even the usually cross-armed crowd of Emo's broke into a miniature mosh-pit during one song about half way through the set, though it immediately and inexplicably reverted back to stationary foot tapping afterwards.

The band did fairly well with the press, as well. Pitchfork even wrote "the things that people tell you about No Age being all transcendent and stuff live are far from exaggerated." Not bad for two guys banging out noisy art-rock in two-minute-long explosions.

Also in attendance at this year's SXSW was hip-hop duo The Cool Kids, who are exceptional not only for the extraordinary amount of buzz they brought to the festival, but for grabbing so much attention despite being outside the festival's most popular genre of indie-rock.

Before scoring a record contract last summer, The Cool Kids released all their music through their MySpace profile alone yet still managed to assemble a remarkable following thanks to blog links and word of mouth. Their nostalgic, "old school" beats and tongue-in-cheek rhymes (like calling themselves "the new, black Beastie Boys") packed Emo's during a Biz 3 Publicity showcase that also featured such talked about groups as Crystal Castles, Does It Offend You Yeah? and Kid Sister as well as DJ duo Flosstradamus, who introduced The Cool Kids to SXSW last year by pulling them onstage during their set.

The Cool Kids have yet to release their first LP, but it’s already easy to see how far their popularity has reached. One fan from California called their turn at Emo's an "amazing set" that "the crowd was completely feeling." An Austin local said they're "pretty much the flyest act on the planet". Even the gear-heads at Wired Magazine got swept up by the band, writing "their show was incredible, with even the effortlessly hip throwing their hands in the air."

But cool as they are, The Cool Kids are still stuck in second behind the publicity-hungry "blog band" that managed to make the most noise in a town full of it. Of course, the reference again belongs to Vampire Weekend, who played an overcrowded Antone's that, even filled over capacity as it was, featured a line of people down Lavaca St. waiting to get in.

The foursome appeared onstage in their already familiar collegiate-prep apparel and ran through a set culled from their debut LP. The response was as one might expect: a majority of the already-converted bobbed their heads and shouted lyrics, but they were interspersed with a large group of skeptics searching for weight behind the hype.

The verdict? Undecided. For every affectionate rave of the band's first appearance at SXSW, there's a headline like "SXSW '08: Vampire Weekend don't live up to hype" (from BuzzNet) or Mercury News' assessment that they seem "destined to join... the ever-growing 'Weren't they supposed to be huge?' list" that buzz bands from SXSW past like The Arctic Monkeys currently reside on.

At the very least, the Columbia University alumni have shown that they know how to draw a crowd and they know how to deliver what that crowd wants. There weren’t too many fans disappointed by the band’s appearance, but there weren’t too many new converts either.

Vampire Weekend ultimately proved true what their harshest detractors predicted: not that they’re terrible musicians or ineffective song writers, they’re just unremarkable- adequate musicians who make perfectly tolerably pop songs that happened to get caught up in an industry in transition. You can’t hold that against them, and if they happen to get a few crowds moving in the process, all the better.

2008-03-09T23:24:00.003-04:00

As far as film adaptations go, Paulo Morelli's "City of Men" took the long way to arriving on the silver screen. The film is based on the television serial of the same name, which in turn was based on the spectacular 2002 feature "City of God", which, of course, was based on the identically titled 1997 novel.

It was inevitable- after going through so many mediums and back again over the course of a decade- the story's tone would change significantly, but the two divergent titles themselves do a good job of explaining the differences between the films.

Though they both examine the lives of young people growing up in the wake of the gang-violence consuming Rio de Janeiro, "God" is a fast paced crime drama where the combat is never far from the focus, murder, drug abuse and rape are constantly threatening to burst into the lives of the protagonists and the gang leaders are, to an extent, pseudo-deified living legends (at least as long as they're still alive).

"Men", on the other hand, is more absorbed in the patriarchal melodrama surrounding two newly 18 year olds, Ace and Laranjinha, the former dealing with raising a child despite not feeling like much of an adult himself and the latter searching for his real father.

The over-bearing influence the warring gangs has on their lives is still present, but it's mostly kept in the background, looming over the film like a specter only to be shrugged off and accepted by the two leads before it explodes into the forefront and changes everything.

Even the look and atmosphere of these two companion pieces differ. Where "God" was hyper-saturated and swiftly edited, "Men" feels more relaxed in its execution, taking the time to meditate on the slums of the city and swapping its predecessor's rich color palette for a more muted tone, though it still gets plenty of mileage out of the irony that such terrible things happen in one of the world's most naturally beautiful regions.

The end result of these changes is that while "God" succeeded on sheer grandeur, producing, arguably, the more entertaining and consistent film, "Men" feels more natural and mature, less provocative or even exploitative of a very real and terrible situation.

Some pacing issues and a non-existent ending keep the film from completely living up to its precursor's impressive reputation, but "Men" is a fascinating and terrifying look at the lives of those affected by an ongoing war that rarely comes to light in the rest of the world.

2008-03-01T20:49:00.001-05:00

If it isn't there already, the film industry is at least dangerously close to the point where special effects no longer matter. The technology has simply advanced so far that effects aren't really a relevant gauge to a film's quality anymore. Certainly some are more convincing than others, but there's really only so many times filmmakers can expect audiences to watch New York City being destroyed and still be impressed by it.

Michel Gondry is a sort of reaction to that. He made his name directing music videos in the '90s, a time when Puff Daddy video budgets were pushing a million dollars and they all included at least one explosion and/ or speed boat chase. Contrarily, Gondry's videos (for artists like Björk and Daft Punk) were meticulously crafted, detail oriented and charmingly low-tech. While other directors were trying to attract attention with ridiculous, high concept bombast, Gondry's shoe-string budget videos were infinitely more memorable.

Gondry followed that aesthetic into his feature length film career. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" was a manic visual representation of the human psyche that relied at least slightly on CGI, though the most interesting scenes involved distorted perspectives, hidden doors and two very willing leads. His writing debut, 2006's "The Science of Sleep", attempted the Herculean task of representing dreams on film and largely pulled it off, thanks mostly to endearingly low-tech visuals and a lyrical narrative unconcerned with realism or reality.

But Gondry's newest film, "Be Kind Rewind", marks the first time the whimsical imagery alone doesn't quite equate engaging cinema. The plot centers on Mos Def and Jack Black, two guys manning a video rental/ thrift store in Passaic, New Jersey who accidentally erase their store's entire film library and decide to record their own versions as replacements. But the plot is mostly an inconsequential excuse for Gondry to show off his latest cardboard-related film techniques and the characters don't grow or accomplish so much as they hang around and make funny videos.

And the videos are hilarious; it's the movie around them that needs some work. For a film that subtly implies Hollywood has turned cinema into a homogenized and formulaic exercise in by-committee design, "Rewind" feels a bit too much like it's playing it safe.

Still, even if "Rewind" doesn't quite prove its own point, that the hand-made and authentic beats glossy grandeur, it's at least refreshing to see someone attempt to change the world of cinema for the better. The abrupt ending feels altogether too close to the Hollywood sentimentalism "Rewind" rebels against, but the emotional resonance is still there. If nothing else, Gondry has succeeded in making a film for the masses without losing what made him inspiring in the first place.

2008-02-22T12:05:00.001-05:00

1976 was a landmark year for cinema, producing some of the greatest films ever made from a few of the most acclaimed directors of the time. This single year gave the cinematheques of the world films by such auteurs as Bernardo Bertolucci, Sidney Lumet, Alan J. Pakula and Martin Scorsese, responsible for films that are still lauded today as quintessential examples of the medium.

Bertolucci’s “1900” was a sociological look at sex and survival in the early twentieth century. Lumet’s “Network” examined America’s increasingly isolated and apathetic way of life. Pakula’s “All the President’s Men” relates the events leading up to the Watergate scandal and Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” followed a misguided anti-hero through the most vicious streets of New York City.

They were all powerful, political films with strong messages, often beautiful photography and understated emotional resonance. They were films that set standards still upheld today by serious film makers and still greatly appreciated by serious film fans. And the best picture of the year as decided by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences? “Rocky”: Sylvester Stallone’s underdog sports story of training montages set to “Gonna Fly Now”.

Granted, “Rocky” was an extremely popular film that resonated with a lot of people, but it hasn’t exactly aged well and it’s rarely revered in quite the same way some of 1976’s other works are. In fewer words: the Academy got it wrong, and it’s far from the only time.

Consider “Gone With the Wind” beating out the beloved “Wizard of Oz” in 1939. Or “How Green was my Valley” taking the award over oft-considered “greatest film of all time” “Citizen Cane” in 1941. The musical “My Fair Lady” won in 1964 over Stanely Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and the melodrama “Kramer vs. Kramer” took “Best Picture” in 1979 over Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now”.

Perhaps the most important director of the 1990s, Quentin Tarantino, was overlooked twice at the Academy Awards. In 1994 his milestone “Pulp Fiction” lost to “Forest Gump”, of all things, and in 1997 “Jackie Brown” was passed on in favor of “Titanic”. Jackie Brown may not have been the most important or even one of the best works of Tarantino, but the fact that “Titanic” won at all is pretty embarrassing in and of itself.

And the less said of such recent crowd-pleasing but ultimately empty works like “American Beauty” and “Crash”, two Best Picture winners surely some at the Academy are already regretting, the better.

Which brings us to the present, only a few days away from the 2007 Academy Award ceremony. 2007 was a similarly exceptional year for film, bringing work from everyone from Lumet (again), to thriller veteran David Cronenberg, niche-hero Wes Anderson, the versatile Joel and Ethan Cohen and the always impressive Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Cohen Brother’s “No Country for Old Men” and Thomas Anderson’s “There Will be Blood” are both nominated for “Best Picture” this year, but, inexplicably, so is “Juno”, an inoffensive but entirely unremarkable comedy directed by Jason Reitman, a director classified as “Wes Anderson-lite” by film critic Tate Dersh as the actual Wes Anderson isn’t even mentioned.

So why do forgettable films so often win top honors from an organization that prides itself on its film expertise? The Academy is frequently accused of bureaucratic tendencies and criticized for rewarding directors and actors retroactively, years after their best work and at the expense of someone else’s. But maybe these tastemakers (and make no mistake, the Oscars have a big influence on ticket, rental and DVD sales) simply don’t have very good taste.

Either way, even though the Oscars really shouldn’t be important, they are. The Academy is an institution that affects the entire industry, so film fans can only hope for the best come February 24, when the eightieth annual Academy Awards will likely result in plenty of newly unfortunate decisions.

2008-02-20T18:33:00.002-05:00

The problem with "In Bruges", the new film from director Martin McDonagh, is that it isn't sure what film it’s trying to be. Is it a dark comedy? A romantic comedy? A drug-fueled surrealist buddy comedy? Is it a Tarantino-esque crime flick infused with stylized dialogue? Or is it a serious melodrama?

In the beginning, at least, it's the story of two hitmen, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), fresh off a successful job and ordered to leave London for the titular city in Belgium to wait for the heat to die down. Ken is happy to explore the preserved Medieval architecture while Ray can't wait to get away from the "old buildings and that" and back into the city and for a while that's the film. Ray arches his eyebrows and looks cute while being bored and Ken drags him to ancient churches and art museums anyway. The dialogue maintains a steady 50/50 ratio of clunkers to genuinely funny lines and “In Bruges” seems content to be a movie about just that. Then things start to get weird.

A girl becomes involved, bringing the romance, the hitmen's employer shows up in town, bringing the action, and their own backstory is fleshed out, bringing the drama. All the while, things are getting more and more surreal and somewhere between the drug-dealer girlfriend and the racist dwarf, it becomes difficult to tell which parts are supposed to be funny and which aren't.

Not that there's anything wrong with blending genres, but "Bruges" consistently stumbles with its own tone, featuring comic moments that jarringly turn sour, then sad, then funny again. And as the film sinks deeper into surrealism, it becomes more difficult to take seriously while, contradictingly, asking the audience to take it more seriously.

All that being said, “In Bruges” is entertaining, and if you're just looking for a good popcorn movie, you could do a lot worse. If only it were a bit more consistent, it’d be a better film for it. It simply doesn't ever go in one direction far enough to benefit from the constant digressions.

Ray inadvertently sums up the film best himself, while analyzing a painting and discussing the concept of purgatory. "That's in between, right?" he asks Ken, picking out the details in brush strokes. "Not really shit, but not really great either?"

Exactly.

2008-02-13T13:13:00.002-05:00

I like Britt Daniel. I like how his voice has an instantly recognizable timbre that somehow alludes to both an animated, rockstar swagger and a seemingly contradictory vulnerability. I like how he ties metaphors of love and life to boring, everyday objects like newspapers and slippers. And i like his songs, even though he's been playing off the same chord changes for 15 years.

I recently picked up the new Spoon album, the embarrassing to say Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and it's definitely another Spoon album, but don't hold that against it. To criticize Spoon records for sounding alike would be like those guys who bash each new Wes Anderson film for being "another Wes Anderson film". Daniel, like Anderson, knows what he likes and he knows how to make something interesting out of it with each new record. In fact, if anything, the formula of a Britt Daniel Spoon song is sort of like the formula of a William Shakespeare sonnet. There's a very specific set of guidelines, but from that constricting structure comes an impressive amount of variety and creativity.

The lead single The Underdog is likely to get most of the attention, and i think that's fair. It's a very well constructed song and easily the catchiest Spoon has written since The Way We Get By. In fact, i wouldn't be surprised if five years from now a substantial number of comedy films will use Underdog to score their trailers in lieu of The Way, but for now, it's a simple melody that packs a lot punch into its gradually ascending structure.

But once you get around the bombast of that single, you'll realize the rest of the album has a lot to offer as well. Songs like You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb and Finer Feelings will feel familiar to Spoon fans, and i mean that as a compliment. Listening to those songs is like reuniting with old friends and forgetting the hard feelings that kept you from each other in the first place. And even songs that sound like filler experiments on the first listen prove to have a stirring complexity bubbling up right beneath the surface. I'm talking about The Ghost of You Lingers and My Little Japanese Cigarette Case specifically, here, two songs that didn't hold my attention at all until they suddenly demanded it, and i enjoyed myself more for it.

I guess it comes down to whether or not you like Britt Daniel too. If you don't, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga will not make you a convert. And if you do, you won't find any surprises here, but you'll come away with a few new favorite songs and the reassurance that Spoon hasn't let 15 years come between them and solid pop songs by any means.

2007-10-28T16:11:00.000-04:00

From the opening seconds of his 1998 breakout hit, Rushmore, director Wes Anderson's films have felt like watching a life-sized pop-up book: modern and melancholy fairy tales brought to life with bright colors and carefully considered details filling every inch of the meticulously composed frames. So it only makes sense that his most recent film, The Darjeeling Limited, takes place in India, an exotic, overcrowded locale where the vibrant colors and tendency toward the unexpected perfectly fit with the essence of a Wes Anderson world.

The Darjeeling Limited is Anderson's fifth feature film, but the first he's written with collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman, the latter also one of the film's stars. The results of this partnership don't stray far from what one would expect from the director- like in previous films, his characters are still depressive yet affable caricatures going through identity crises- but the film does seem to derail unexpectedly in its second act, spiraling out of control where most Anderson films feel carefully guided.

The story follows three estranged brothers, Jack (Schwartzman), Peter (Adrien Brody) and Francis Whitman (Owen Wilson), on what eldest brother Francis hopes will be a spiritual journey, bringing the family back together after the death of their father and disappearance of their mother in addition to their their own personal traumas (Jack is going through a break-up, Peter worried about his abilities as a new father and Francis recovering from a motorcycle wreck).

As the three brothers ride the titular train, they refer to laminated, hour-by-hour itineraries, attempting to take in all the country has to offer, yet their visits to even the most sacred and beautiful landmarks end in bickering about borrowed belts and withheld information.

It isn't until the brothers leave the train and a bizarre chain of events leaves the plans scrapped that the Whitmans rediscover their fundamental bond to one another, allowing them to finally reconnect as a family as well as individually depart with their emotional baggage (winkingly visualized here by 11 actual suitcases the brothers haul around throughout most of the film).

Darjeeling feels like an epic travelogue even at a relatively brisk 91 minutes, probably because, like all Anderson films, there's so much to take in. Where other directors interpret emotional development with sweeping string-scores and ham-handed monologues, Anderson's characters are often the most heart breaking at their subtlest, dropping the most revelatory information so nonchalantly you'd miss it if you weren't careful.

Beyond the beautiful photography, precisely picked soundtrack and impressive attention to detail, this is why Anderson's films have found such a following. Even amidst such extravagance, humor and whimsy, Anderson's emotional resonance feels far more authentic than that of his peers.

2007-10-06T17:45:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

I got into Jerzy Kosinski on a fluke. I was bored one night in my late teens following links through various web logs of people i've never heard of before when one of those blogs had a link titled simply "Being There". I was curious, so i clicked, and it led me to a plain white web page with nothing more than a picture of Peter Sellers in a funny suit and the words "If anyone's ever seen the movie Being There, email me and tell me what you thought about the end."

Guerrilla advertisers, take note: that was the single most intriguing thing about a film i've ever read. After reading that one sentence, i knew i had to see this movie. Unfortunately, this was pre-NetFlix (or at least before i knew about NetFlix) and it's not like i could just walk into a BlockBuster and find... well, anything worth watching really, so i dug around and discovered Being There was adapted from a book of the same name.

Finding good books in suburbia is much easier than finding good movies, and it wasn't long before i had a copy of Being There and not much longer after that Being There rose into the ranks of my favorite books. Ever since then, i've been hunting Kosinski novels down. Not a visit to a second-hand book store goes by without obtaining one, and while some are better than others (The Devil Tree, i think, might be the single best novel ever written; Steps, contrarily, i could take or leave), Kosinski routinely shows himself a master of his craft. His novels are short, sporadic, cynical, and terrifyingly true to life.

Cockpit follows the scenario Steps introduced and The Devil Tree perfected: a wealthy playboy has an unlimited income and endless free time, but still feels trapped from ever building any lasting or meaningful relationships. I didn't know it at the time, but the reason Kosinski seems to enjoy writing about this theme so much is that it's almost entirely autobiographical. After marrying a steal heiress, Kosinski found himself with an incredible amount of money, all the time a successful writer has to himself, but few friends or relatives to share them with.

Cockpit includes an especially appealing hook: this time the wealthy playboy is actually a wealthy secret agent. He has a disposable income and plenty of time to kill waiting for jobs, but his line of work determines that he can't stay in any one place for a substantial amount of time, leaving his romantic endeavors to fall on one-offs and bizarre, mutual black mailings.

In a lesser writer's hands, this synopsis would quickly devolve into pulp: cheap action sequences separated by vulgar encounters. Kosinski, though, spends little time on what his protagonist actually does for his high ranking employer and more time on how he tries to escape the identity (or lack of one) his career has given him.

The secret agent gimmick gives us a couple good thrills and allows Kosinski to explain how, in real life, he fabricated letters from imaginary officials allowing him to leave the country, but the majority of the book picks up where Steps and The Devil Tree left off: following a disturbed man's horrifying sexual exploits. In fact, almost every female character introduced in the narrative ends up sleeping with him, and never for reasons that satisfy either party. Clearly, Kosinski's view on our race is dismal: through his eyes we are a virus, using any means necessary to proliferate. Love is not in his vocabulary; violence is the most common mode of expression.

Though Cockpit can at times be almost unbearable, the point is well taken, and the narration is so good that even the most barbaric scenes feel poetic. Kosinski's signature style of loosely connected vignettes works perfectly here, confusing people expecting a straight forward pulp piece but amazing the rest of us. Like life, Kosinski novels never seem to follow a set sequence of events. There's no clear cut beginning or satisfying end. There's only the people and events that shape us, for better or, much more often here, worse.

2007-09-28T00:28:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

My 1972 edition of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five looks exactly like the cover i've posted above but replaces the words "by the author of the best seller SLAPSTICK" with "The Big Bestseller... Now The Great Movie!".

I was vaguely aware there was a Slaughterhouse Five film out there but now, after reading the source material, i find it even more difficult to image such a thing.

Trying to synopsize the story would be missing the point, so i'll just quote the brief on the second page:

A fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much), who, as an American infantry scout Hors de Combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, "the Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale. This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.

Did you catch all that?

Even if you did, the book makes no great effort to keep you from getting lost in its tangle of parallel narratives experienced simultaneously by the time traveling protagonist. Instead, little snippets of a scene are described before giving way to another situation, in another time and, often, in another galaxy altogether.

These quick flashes of narrative suggest Kosinski (my favorite author, but more about him next time), albeit in a more playful frame of mind then we're used to. Yes, it's a war story ultimately, but it's still Vonnegut, and examining the horrors of infantry service take a back seat to exploring the zen-like beauty of the fourth dimension.

2007-09-21T12:09:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

As with Walt Disney, i felt Don Quixote demanded a change of pace. I decided to follow the sprawling, one thousand plus page epic of La Mancha's famous knight-errant with a short collection of short stories by a man who writes brief, concise sentences.

A Russian Doll collects nine stories by Adolfo Bioy Casares, an Argentinean author whom i previously knew only as the man behind The Dream of Heroes. I didn't, in fact, even know he wrote short stories at all before coming upon this publication in a second hand book store somewhere in Chicago.

It turns out there's a lot i didn't know about Casares. Where The Dream of Heroes, one of my favorite novels, presents a sort of slice of life of traditional Argentinean culture (maté, gauchos, knife fights; it hits all the main points), A Russian Doll is more playful, teasing you with seemingly straight forward narratives that quickly veer into rampant surrealism.

The book's namesake, for example, begins by recounting a romance begun by a lonely traveler, but ends up in the center of a toxic lake, examining a kafka-esque giant caterpillar created by radioactive pollution.

Underwater begins much the same way: a loner caught in an unfamiliar place is wooed by a woman, only this time, her father happens to be a mad scientist type creating fish-people who would likely be scoffed at even on the Island of Dr. Moreau. The story takes the classic conflict of whether a man should abandon his old life for the love of a woman to the extreme: will the man abandon his ability to live above the surface for her?

The book's best story, Our Trip (A Diary), recounts a couple's holiday across Europe as a travel diary but includes a gimmick that's way too good for me to give away here. The lovers bicker and argue their way across the continent, all while making an unmistakable point about modern romance.

In fact, all the stories here tell of the conflicts created by our relationships. They're stories you know well, you may have even lived them. The problems are common and realistic. They just happen to be masked under the metaphor of man eating caterpillars and fish women.

2007-09-09T12:48:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

In the 1990's, the box office was dominated by the romantic comedy. They were usually formulaic, starred an actor from a popular sitcom of the time, made an awful lot of money and then vanished into the recesses of forgettable cinema forever, only reappearing in the context of an edited showing on TBS or Comedy Central years later.

I've seen a few myself simply because the market was so over-saturated it'd be difficult to make it through the decade without. But the only one i really remember was called Kissing a Fool and starred (not surprisingly) David Schwimmer (more commonly known as Ross from Friends) and Jason Lee.

The premise has stuck with me because it goes down an interesting psychological path for the usually very conservative romantic comedy. Schwimmer is about to get married but feels insecure about his fiancé's commitment, so he asks his best friend, Lee, to attempt to seduce her before the wedding date. I'm sure you know what comes next: Lee tries to dissuade him, eventually gives in to help his friend, and then ends up falling in love with the girl himself. But despite the early predictability of the premise, the film does a good job of exploring jealousy and the frivolous nature of love.

I'm recounting this seemingly unrelated movie premise because i recently discovered why Kissing a Fool was so successful at shaking the core of the romantic comedy: it was stolen wholesale from The Adventures of Don Quixote of La Mancha.

Specifically, it was adapted from one of the many stories Quixote is told during his exploration of Spain, titled The Tale of the Ill-Advised Curiosity. In it, the exact same set-up is described, although it does end quite differently, being set in seventeenth century Spain. I thought maybe this would be a good anecdote to introduce Don Quixote because it shows just how timeless the stories within truly are. Part I of Don Quixote was published in 1605. Nearly four hundred years later, it's still a viable source for lazy screen writers.

Don Quixote is a classic for a reason. It's been called the first modern novel just as often as it's been called the all time greatest. Don Quixote is an elegant anti-hero of sorts, a man full of ambition, drive and a genuine love for life and the people in it, but ridiculed both by the author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and his characters to the point of death. It's the story of a modern world so cynical that chivalry can only be interpreted as outright madness, and that's a theme that fits the 1600's just as faithfully as it would the 2000's.

Despite all this, Part I of Don Quixote of La Mancha tends to drag. Too often, Quixote seems like the comic relief in his own story, battling sheep because he thinks they're a medieval army, for example, and then, somehow, losing that fight. Likewise, the most famous of Quixote's adventures, the Adventure of the Windmills which is prominently displayed on the cover of every edition of Don Quixote ever, is entirely anti-climactic and can be summed up in one sentence. Don Quixote sees a windmill, thinks it's a giant, charges and falls down. Maybe that was biting satire in Cervantes' time, but reading it now it's hard to see why that's what most people remember of Don Quixote, except, perhaps, that it happens so early in the book that it's the only thing they get to.

Indeed, Don Quixote is long, but i don't want to give the wrong impression. Even if the windmill incident isn't uproariously funny, surprisingly, a lot of the book is. This isn't like reading Shakespeare in high school where your World Lit teacher has to explain to you why something is funny (because nothing's funnier than having someone tell you it's funny, right?). Cervantes displays a keen sense of comedic timing and an awful lot of what Don Quixote says and does actually is funny. Not coy smile clever, but laugh out loud funny, even four centuries later.

But Quixote isn't stuck to one note either. Even though he gets the most laughs, he is also endlessly quotable, and his are often the most interesting and entertaining remarks throughout the book. At times it's clear that Cervantes was using Quixote to comment on the social and political climate of the time, satire that completely escapes my one semester of European History education. But he just as often describes the human condition, with almost every tale Don Quixote encounters involving a romance gone awry. I'm not sure what was going on in Cervantes life when he wrote this story, but i'd venture to guess a woman was involved.

Part II picks up the pace considerably, taking place after Don Quixote Part I has already been published and become incredibly famous (as it had in real life) and allowing Quixote to act on his larger than life public persona. The stories here are more interesting, with Don Quixote more often resolving conflicts instead of just making himself look ridiculous, and the humor parts are more humorous, now that the entire world knows Don Quixote, they're more than happy to indulge him for their amusement (and ours).

Because by this time Quixote (and his faithful squire Sancho Panza, who i have thus far unjustly failed to mention) are famous for their exploits, they are often treated like knight-errants proper, both reenforcing Quixote's beliefs that he is the most reveled knight in all of history and bringing on some strange circumstances for him to tackle. In one of the final ongoing story arcs, Quixote and Sancho are taken in by a Count and Countess, who use their wealth to play elaborate tricks on the two involving a servant girl who pretends to be madly in love with the knight and the bizarre, pagan rituals he has to endure to awaken her from her love induced swoon. Sancho, in turn, gets an adventure all to himself when the Count makes him the governor of an "island" in one of the book's most entertaining stories.

In the end, Don Quixote finally is vanquished, not by a better knight or, for that matter, a giant or dragon, but a concerned friend who believes Quixote's reckless behavior need to be stopped. The characters never fully understand it, but to the reader it's clear: the day Don Quixote stops believing his own elaborate fantasy is the day he'll lose the will to go on. For all the outrageous exploits and adventures, Don Quixote boils down to a story about a man who simply seeks his own unique happiness in a world that is intent on bringing him down to their miserable reality. This too, is an element of Don Quixote that will insure it remains timeless.

2007-08-31T12:18:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

After going through the dictionary sized Walt Disney, i returned to the library looking for some lighter reading. On the new releases shelf, i noticed Haruki Murakami's After Dark, judged it solely on its cover, and decided it might be worth reading. It's hard to tell from the picture, but the cover features alternating lines that make up two images of a Japanese bodega. Unfortunately, the cover turned out the be the most clever and interesting thing the book had to offer.

On the inside back cover, the library had taped a little piece of paper where they encouraged readers to jot down their thoughts on the book. I thought that was a great idea, and read the first (and only) review written there. I remember most of it because it was so incredibly pompous. If i may paraphrase, it read as follows:

The city has a pulse, and so do the characters of this novel. Murakami once again proves himself a master of his craft. His prose is like a greyhound: sleek, fast and strong.

That's right. His prose is like a greyhound.

I responded to that review after i finished the novel myself by writing something akin to:

Murakami has a lot of good ideas in After Dark, but he never lets them go anywhere or resolve themselves. Instead, the characters stumble through the night without motivation, purpose or growth, and the story frustratingly finishes with a tangle of unanswered questions and loose ends.

I may have been a little pompous myself, to tell the truth, but i think if you read the book you'd agree. For example, an ongoing story arc (if you could even call it such a thing) involves a young woman who started sleeping one day and never woke up. She's not dead, but she doesn't respond to anyone's attempts to communicate, and it's eventually revealed that she's trapped in some sort of dream world where a man without a face watches her in an old office building-like cell. I didn't have any problem with the story switching over into a more paranormal atmosphere, but the girl never wakes up, the identity of the man without a face is never revealed, and, essentially, everything that happens to the two is entirely without consequence.

After Dark seems to be set on answering the question "Is a story still a story without an ending? Is a novel really a novel if the events don't add up or lead to a satisfying conclusion?" Unfortunately, it also answers that question with a resounding "no".

2007-08-26T16:43:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

Like everyone born after 1930, i was raised on the Disney classics: Snow White, Pinnochio, Bambi, what have you. Likewise, i was constantly surrounded by the Disney image: i slept with a Winnie the Pooh stuffed bear, wore a Mickey Mouse t-shirt to school where i probably carried Alladin shaped fruit snacks in a Scrooge McDuck lunch box (with accompanying Launchpad thermos). The ubiquity of Disney is something i think every kid takes for granted, and the three black circles that abstractly represent Mickey Mouse's head is more recognized in America than any other logo ever.

But despite this, i never really had any interest in Disney, the man, until i had been to Disney World when i was about 12 years old and, specifically, after getting off a single ride in particular. That ride was Epcot Center's fallen former glory of Horizons, which was demolished a few years back to make room for another generic rocket ship ride. Luckily, i had the chance to experience Horizons before it was cruelly taken away from us (multiple times, in fact) and i think it probably single handedly sparked my current obsession with what i refer to as Retro-Futurism, that dated, somehow nostalgic look at what the future should have been like but simply won't ever happen now.

Horizons was made without Disney's input, it was built years after his death in 1966, but it followed very closely his projections for a perfect, self sustaining, ecologically friendly and scientifically and culturally advanced future. It spelled out in terms even a child could understand how humans would adapt to living in underwater cities, how agriculture would take place in biologically self sufficient and self contained ecosystems alongside sprawling, solar powered metropolises, and of course, how the family of the future would live comfortably on other planets.

It wasn't the Jetsons; it was plausible and responsible. It was the perfect world Walt Disney had constantly been striving for his entire career. The fact that it was destroyed to make room for a more modern and "exciting" ride only further adds to its parallels with Disney's dreams.

Neal Gabler's Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, attempts the daunting task of recounting Disney's dreams: how they began, how they were (sometimes) realized, and how they were invariably destroyed. The book is the single most comprehensive biography i've ever read, tediously researched from archived material, survivors and even the rarely opened Disney vault. And it's written very much from Walt's perspective, so entire chapters are devoted to things that were important to him like the early Alice comedies and the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit shorts despite the fact that no one remembers Disney for them, while venerable classics like Dumbo and The Jungle Book have only a passing reference in a paragraph or two, simply because Walt wasn't nearly as involved.

Likewise, the notorious Disney strike, a strike that vilified the public image of Disney as a talentless capitalist taking credit for his animator's work, is explained through the point of view of a scared, tired and aging man who only wanted to create and couldn't understand why his collaborators suddenly hated him. Walt could certainly be relentless, and perhaps self absorbed and insensitive to others, but it was only because he was so thoroughly committed to quality, an attribute that meant no matter how successful he and his company got, he was always in a state of perpetual debt- always pushing for something better.

And even though he was so devoted to his work, he could be quite fickle with it. Upon creating the most successful cartoon character ever with Mickey Mouse, Walt was unsatisfied with his pre-feature shorts and put everything he had on the line to make a full length animation. After Snow White was a surprise success (the most successful movie of its time, in fact), Walt bored of creating rich narratives and instead wanted to create memorable art, working with Salvador Dali and eventually Leopold Stokowski in Fantasia. When the artistic side of the medium tired him too, Walt went about creating a theme park, the first of its kind, called Disney Land. And after Disney Land became a huge hit, he turned his attention again, to creating utopia.

This is where my Disney obsession really begins and ends. Though Walt was always enamored with history, nostalgia and fantasy, he was also always looking ahead, and EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, was his dream that, if any, would permanently change the world. EPCOT would be an entirely self sufficient city based on art and creativity instead of business and politics. It would contain houses and skyscrapers alike running on their own generated solar power and public transportation using renewable energies, and this was 1964, decades before anyone was seriously considering the harmful effects of fossil fuels!

EPCOT was how Walt believed the whole world should be: clean, organized, peaceful and fun. Its radial design allowed for everything any of its residents would need: a central school and commercial district, industry, residential areas, and "the green belt", a middle ring of city services like parks and playgrounds, community centers and places of worship which would separate the low density housing with the core of the city.

Gabler tells us Walt requested Ward Kimball, a longtime animator and supporter of EPCOT, to continue to research and develop EPCOT from his death bed, pleading that he didn't "want to be remembered for drawing a mouse". After his death, Walt's brother and Disney cofounder Roy, killed the project, coldly telling Kimball "Walt's dead, so is his city."

The Epcot Center in Disney World was built as a memorial of Walt's utopia, a weak reminder of what could have been. But even if his perfect city never happened, Disney succeeded in inspiring millions of people to take interest in and seriously consider the future, and i count myself among them.

2007-08-25T13:34:00.000-04:00

Summer Reading List

Sometimes it takes death for a person to enter or re-enter social consciousness, as was the case with author Kurt Vonnegut who, after dying early this year received nothing less than two thousand obituaries ending with the phrase "so it goes". He also received a great send off from my favorite media magazine, The Onion's A.V. Club called '15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Then Anyone Ever Has or Will'.

Reading through this list, i noticed quite a few revolved around Vonnegut's invented religion of Bokononism from his novel Cat's Cradle. Bokononism was intriguing to me because it was at once a sneering satire of the real thing and also somehow better, because at least this religion admitted it was completely bogus (so why not believe in this one?).

My favorite entry in the list ended up being my favorite of Bokonon's proverbs from the book:

Lion got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to ask himself why, why, why
Lion got to rest
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand

Just as much a cynical stab at religion as it is an understanding explanation for it, this simple calypso, as they're called in Bokononism, perfectly articulates what is wrong and right about our religions of the world; how they help us and how they ultimately destroy us. It was certainly enough, anyway, for me to find a copy of the book at the library.

2007-08-12T17:41:00.000-04:00

Detroit Part Four:

After our (non) adventure in the Packard Motor Plant, i wanted to capture another dilapidated landmark of Detroit, the infamous Michigan Central Station. Michigan Central could have been the single, defining building that would have saved Detroit had it not been given up on. It was a large, intercity passenger train terminal, not at all unlike Chicago's Central Station, the terminal built in 1893 which not only connected the city to the rest of the country but also served the suburban trains of Illinois Central as well as the South Shore Line streetcars.

These public services helped Chicago thrive by allowing people easy access into and around the city. The city remained connected to other major metropolises and its residents could get around the city via a means affordable for just about everyone.

Unfortunately, Michigan Central Station didn't fare nearly as well. There are a number of likely reasons, most involve the station's relatively remote location. It was placed far from downtown on purpose, in hopes of reinvigorating a less prosperous area of Detroit. However, instead of extending the city's economic gains, the station ended up a burden for most of its passengers. After a gradual decline in ticket sales, the station closed in 1988, a product, not a source, of Detroit's undoing.

But while Chicago's Central Station was eventually demolished in favor of newer terminals, Detroit never found the need for the land Michigan Central Station sits on to this day. Without any money to tear down the structure and rebuild, Michigan Central's hollow shell remains gloriously in tact. Bad news for Detroit's economy, but wonderful news for budding photographers like Courtney and i.

In fact, while we taking pictures of the building, a mini van pulled up next to me, the driver rolled down the window and asked what this giant, empty structure was. I gave him a brief explanation and we stared at the hollow remains until he broke the silence.

"It's a shame," he said, and i agreed. One of the most beautiful structures in Detroit has been left to graffiti artists and homeless people. A structure that once signified change and posterity has devolved into a crumbling mess of concrete and broken windows. In many ways, it stands as a visual metaphor of the city itself.

2007-08-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

Detroit Part Three:

Now, a brief history lesson.

Fort Détroit was founded in 1701 by French fur traders. The name came from the Detroit River or, at the time, Riviére du Détroit, "River of the Strait". In the French and Indian War of 1760, British troops took control of the fort, shortened the name to simply Detroit, and later passed it on to the United States under the Jay Treaty of 1796.

As the settlement expanded, Michigan Territory Chief Justice Augustus B. Woodward planned a street layout and the city became the capital of Michigan in 1805. Mansions and post-reconstruction buildings sprung up in the city, giving it the nickname of "Paris of the West". A thriving carriage trade eventually led to the first Model T built by Henry Ford in 1904, and brought with it the emergence of the Dodge brothers, Walter Chrysler and William C. Durant.

This new industry led to amazing growth for the industry, bringing in many new residents, particularly laborers from the south. The "Color Blind" employment practices of the new factories created undeniable racial tensions, eventually leading to the white flight of the 1960's causing the first signs of urban decay. The city's small business owners departed to the suburbs as well, the city's tax base saw a steep decline, and within a decade there were abandoned buildings and homes creeping in on the southeast portion of the city.

In 1967, police raided a blind pig in a black neighborhood on Twelfth Street. They found 82 people inside celebrating the return of two Vietnam veterans and attempted to arrest everyone on the scene. A small crowd gathered in protest, and after the last police car was out of sight, the Twelfth Street Riots began. Five days of rioting later, 7000 people had been arrested and 43 were killed.

The gas crisis of the 1970's shook the auto industry as smaller, foreign cars became more popular. Despite these early warning signs, Detroit continued it's blind support of the Big Three automakers, building more roads and freeways and giving virtually no attention to the prospect of public transportation. Heroin and cocaine epidemics spread throughout the city, and many abandoned homes became havens for drug dealers. Devil's Night, an area tradition of small pranks the night before Halloween, evolved into city-wide arson.

Which brings us to today, 2007, where a sizable portion of the former "Paris of the West" lays in ruins, abandoned structures seem more common than occupied ones, and the auto industry, the life force of the city, loses power and profits every single year.

That's not to say Detroit's decline was inevitable. It was the result of short-sightedness on behalf of the city's officials, voters and auto industry lobbyists. If Detroit's auto industry concerns was handled differently, it would still be on par with Chicago today. But while Chicago, today the third most populated city in the U.S., embraced the railway links that connected it to the rest of the country, Detroit discredited them, focusing entirely on the private transportation that made it grow in the first place.

It wasn't always this way. There are at least signs of a perceived interest in public transportation, and the most visible of these signs was our next stop.

2007-08-12T16:52:00.000-04:00

Detroit Part Two:

I was assigned to cover a specific building among the seemingly endless supply of giant, abandoned structures here. The Packard Motor Plant, established in 1903, was quickly overwhelmed by the competition of the Big Three automakers down the road and ordered to close in 1956. I assume they took most of the supplies and materials out of the building at this point, but the buildings themselves remained, all three and a half million square feet of them. In addition to the plant itself, there was also a huge parking structure and various commercial buildings left to die at the closing. How the place went from a clean, respectable factory to what it has become today was an inevitable side effect of merely existing in East Side Detroit, a place where there's no money to build, and without new buildings, no new money.

To remain as inconspicuous as possible, we parked behind a small building in the cemetery across the street. We took our cameras and nothing else (Courtney took a pocket knife), triple checked the doors were locked, and then hopped the fence.

As we had just gotten there, my level of bravery was at it's peak. I saw an opening from the railroad tracks right into the plant itself, probably where the trains would drop off and load up supplies, and i decided we should follow the tracks in to further investigate. It was pitch black inside, so when a man stumbled out of the darkness six feet away from us, we didn't even see him coming. He seemed to take no notice of us, pissed on the side of the wall, and then wandered back inside. We decided to take another route.

Startled by our first encounter, i suddenly became suspicious of every doorway, every break in the brick. I imagined inside every car that occasionally passed by there were guys with ski masks and nine millimeters just waiting to steal the wallet i didn't even have on me.

I was excited to be exploring something unknown, but at the same time, i didn't dare to venture too far from a way out. I occasionally peaked inside openings to look at the graffiti inside, but i refused to go in.

I saw a piece of two people running on the wall, and from inside a large gated area where the grass grew long, i thought i would make a nice picture. I had to go way back into it to get the shot i wanted, and as soon as i was in, i started hearing movement from the floor above me. Glass and metal began moving around in a way that couldn't possibly have been the wind. I stayed just long enough to take the photo, and then walked away as fast as i could.

I was taking pictures left and right, and hoping i'd be able to fix them later in Photoshop because i didn't dare keep my back turned long enough to adjust shutter speeds and apertures. It sounds ridiculous now because nothing really happened, but everything about the Packard Motor Plant felt ominous and foreboding. It may as well have been a castle on a cliff in the middle of a stormy night. It's the last place you would want to be, and we were only going deeper.

We watched a truck with some sort of wooden apparatus over the bed pull into the buildings opposite us, so we went around the back hoping not to have any sort of encounters. Eventually we came upon the scariest ditch in the world, gaping open doorways leading into blackness that was infinitely scarier than anything that could possibly have been inside. We crossed it to get back toward the buildings where we found an abandoned Packard car. Every facet of the vehicle that could have been destroyed was.

We kept walking past garages and loading docks and after about a half hour without seeing anyone my courage was returning. I went deeper into the structure, turned a corner and saw the truck we had assumed was far gone. I don't know what they were doing there, but it couldn't possibly have been legal. I turned around and told Courtney we were leaving.

We took a different way back to the cemetery to get some more pictures before we got to the car, and we were actually having a lot of fun by this point, but i was still scared to be anywhere in this area. I felt unbelievably vulnerable and unbelievably white. I felt like i didn't belong here and anyone could see that a mile away. I just wanted to leave.

We hopped the fence again, found the Contour unscathed, and drove away with about 150 photos between us.

2007-08-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

Detroit Part One:

Living around (but never in) Detroit my whole life, i've always been the guy that defends the city against it's bum rap. I'll be the first to admit it's a going nowhere sub-city whose future, if it even has one, has been perhaps permanently doomed by the automakers that made it big in the first place. I'm not talking about that.

I mean i've always tried to convince people that it isn't the "Crime Capital of the World". It probably was when that title was being thrown around in the early 90's, but even as the economy gets worse and worse, the city itself is at least trying to rebound, in it's own misguided way. Whatever the case may be, i know people in Detroit and i've never heard any horror stories about stolen cars or burglaries or even muggings. Plus, i go there fairly frequently to see music and the biggest harassment i've ever received is getting asked for change. And, actually, that's not even as much a bother as having to deal with obnoxious scene kids.

Anyway, i've always recognized there were some shady areas in Detroit, but there are shady areas in every city. Detroit's no worse than Chicago, or New York, or at the very least, Compton! I know it's been a long time since the L.A. Riots, but NWA is still the defining image i get of that place.

Keeping all that in mind, i recently took a trip down to Detroit to take some pictures for a journalism project. I was covering "Dilapidated Detroit", a subject i picked because i've always been interested in urban decay, and Detroit has plenty of it.

I convinced Courtney to come with me so we took to the streets, two suburban white kids with digital cameras, to document the hollow remains of Motown's former life force.

As soon as we got off on the Mt. Elliot exit i realized i was completely wrong. The east side of Detroit is not a "shady place", it's a nightmare. Literally entire blocks of buildings lay desolate and empty, and invariably right across the street from cheap housing. I actually just recently read that there are houses in Detroit selling for less than the average car these days. Ouch.

There are probably a couple reasons i've never noticed these giant remains before. The first is that i almost always go to Detroit at night. That's when the shows start, and as Detroit isn't much of a walking around city, there's really no reason to visit during the day. The second is that, in the few instance i have been in Detroit in daylight, i've always been right Downtown. Outside the limited area the People Mover covers, i've never found myself walking around Detroit before.

What we encountered was terrifying. In the gray sunlight of mid afternoon March, there were hulking buildings with broken windows and decrepit walls just about everywhere we looked. And by far the worst thing about this scene is that there were people living in these things. I'm not talking about the tudor across the street. There were guys literally using the filth of these abandoned structures as a home, and i remember wondering, how can the family next door sleep at night? This isn't a neighborhood, this is 'The Mole People', or 'The Hills Have Eyes' or 'The Last House on the Left'. In fact, this is worse. This is truly scary.