Judd Apatow’s Funny People, a film about a comedian/celebrity George Simmons – confused me. As the end credits rolled, I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. I ended up on middle ground, which was really annoying, given my aversion towards the neutrality of things. Indifference is the ultimate insult a common man can assign to a work of art and since cinema (and the love I have for it) is something I hold near and dear, I hated feeling inadequate about either recommending it or shitting on the essence of its being. Here’s the problem first. Adam Sandler (who plays George Simmons) must have hoped Funny People would do for him what JCVD did for Jean Claude Van Damme. I guess it’s alright for celebrities to seek therapy through self-caricaturizing; at least it beats going down to some river to pray. It worked for the Belgian muscleman because the public had never before thought of him as a man who suffers, let alone muse eloquently over all those crappy films he starred in. After watching his insecurities come alive on-screen, no longer did people think Van Damme’s first reaction to anything would be to do a seriously gay version of the splits or position his limbs for a Judo crane kick. The self-loathing characterization in JCVD hit a nerve (in me, at least) because it made for a chilling catharsis of the actor. Even Bruce Campbell’s My Name Is Bruce sort of worked, with the cult legend more than willing to laugh uproariously at his delusions of grandeur while secretly grinning at how fame once pulled a fast one on him about his place in cinema.
Despite not knowing if the director Judd Apatow intended to caricaturize Adam Sandler, I can’t but help nurse suspicions about it. Going by this alone, his film fell a little flat. The only musing I have ever done about Adam Sandler was whether or not the man is truly retarded. The characters he played in films like Billy Madison, Happy Gilmour and Waterboy seemed to be an extension of his real self minus the extraordinary savantism. His stand-up comedy too is centered on funny accents, childish cussing and penile jokes, something I’m sure his mates back home would testify to as a weekend by the couch with a couple of beers activity. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d hate to think this didn’t affect my liking of this film. So, seeing his character supposedly bare his soul on the canvas didn’t do much for me.
Here’s what worked. Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Schwartzman, Leslie Mann, Eric Bana and the ten or so brilliantly executed cameos. Rogen and Hill – who play standup comedians Ira Wright and Leo Koenig – are probably the most sought-after comedians in Hollywood right now. They’re pretty funny, if only they didn’t indulge in so much toilet humour (conveniently, George Simmons makes a mention of it). Here they are in form, especially Rogen with his man-child impersonations. Now I know that if Sarah Silverman and Will Ferrell ever had a child, it’d be really funny. Hollywood’s nerdiest prodigy Jonah Hill is going places with his obnoxious anti-frat boy comedy and he knows it; the arrogance is evident and well-deserved.
As for Jason Schwartzman (he plays Wright and Leo’s egomaniacal roommate), he has a little Bill Murray thing going for him. No matter how similar most of the characters he portrays seem to be, he still manages to make them engaging. In Funny People, the sympathy he shows for his roomies is subtly hilarious. There’s a scene in which he sits next to Rogen’s character and explains why he slept with his date…look at the expressions on Schwartzman’s face, I’m telling you, Mr Murray would be proud.
Leslie Mann’s character (Simmons’ love interest) was well crafted too. I really dug the confrontation scene, with the three men standing there, jaws open and fists raised, unsure of who to blame and for what. Eric Bana provides standard fare as the sweet and sour-tongued Aussie husband who has read too many self-help books. For me, the true highlights of Funny People were the cameos. The scene in which Marshall Mathers (Eminem) confronts Ray Romano (from Everybody Loves Raymond) is just about the funniest scene I have watched in a mainstream movie in a long time. Rap outfit Wu Tang Clan’s RZA, Andy Dick, James Taylor, Paul Reiser – all provide rib-tickling fastfood humour, with quick and to the point punchlines. The Sarah Silverman stand up bit about Kanye West and Obama also qualifies as a laugh out loud moment. (if you find it offensive, you’re a bigger jackass than Kanye).
I’ll say this too…Funny People could be the first step towards changing the public (for all those who care, at least) perception of Adam Sandler’s talent as an actor. Truth be told, it’s probably the most intense he has even been. Even in the vastly underrated Paul Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love, the tragedy of his character’s life seemed more odd than actually moving.
In Funny People, George Simmons desperately tries to take a step back, lose the jokes and get a bit more serious about his place in the world. I guess, in 2009, Adam Sandler tried that too. To quote one of his classically retarded characters – Billy Madison – “Well, I made the duck blue because I’d never seen a blue duck before and I wanted to see one”.
Well, you decide if you want to see this blue duck (I’m aware that at some level, I’m making no sense whatsoever).
Inglourious Basterds: I don’t actively dislike Brad Pitt, the actor. He gets paid a lot for being mediocre and often, absolute shit. Also, to be fair, he has done a decent job in films such as Snatch and uhmmm yeah Snatch was a goooood film. Unfortunately, he is the only real bastard in Quentin Tarantino’s new film. While his character – Lt. Aldo Raine – plays an integral part of Inglourious Basterds, it just doesn’t feel right. The exaggerated southern drawl, the cartoonish anti-heroism, and the obsession with Nazi scalps – don’t get me wrong, cinema could use more scalping these days, but the way Brad Pitt struts around, leading his band of gloriously twisted soldiers and demanding “one hundred Nazi scalps” felt oddly contrived. It didn’t help that the director kept positioning the spotlight towards him at pivotal moments.
The rest of cast however totally brings it. Christoph Waltz, who plays Lt Hans Landa – the Jew Hunter will be remembered fondly as one of modern cinema’s most endearing villains. He has a knack for building up tension through tiny gestures and tinier insinuations; few actors can be gnarly through silence, fewer can do it with the panache of Mr Waltz. Mélanie Laurent’s character – Shosanna Dreyfus (most Jewish name ever) – is your regular Anne Frank with a penchant for pyromania and sweet revenge. Daniel Brühl, Michael Fassbender and a couple of others bring it, as well; their characters perfectly meshing with the film’s volatile twists.
Of course, what good would this review be if I didn’t mention Eli Roth’s (the Hostel director) over-the-top performance as Sgt Donny Donowitz a.ka The Bear Jew, the baseball -swinging Italian stallion (if the stallion had mad cow disease). The fun introduction of his character took me back to the glory days of Desperado but more importantly, it was the only reminder that this indeed was a Quentin Tarantino film. Truth be told, everything else felt weirdly Coen Brothers-ish, only with more blood.
Hills Run Red: This one tells a torturous tale about horror fans getting proper fucked for pursuing that which had mysteriously vanished for a bloody good reason. In this case, a hardly-ever-seen-before B-movie, directed by the JD Salinger of the torture porn genre. During their pursuit, they make all the mistakes we have to come to expect of American teenagers whenever stalked by serial killers or psychopaths. So basically, Hills Run Red is about four of the dumbest horror movie fans ever getting mutilated by the Babyface killer; sometimes hilariously pausing to briefly meditate about the genre itself! Is it fun? Not much, especially with the second half spewing tiresome twists and turns that annoyed me, given that 30 minutes into the film, my brain crawled out of my skull, lit up a cigarette and said, “later, bro” (yes, my brain is a surfer dude). William Sadler’s presence sort of helped. He’s a good actor and his chops brought a bit of credibility to Hills Run Red, as did the really cool opening segment. That Mockingbird song gives me the creeps.
Splinter: Splinter is one of those films that came highly recommended by you, the bat-shit crazy readers. I get the hype …this is one slick survivalist thriller, with tons of neat special effects and a healthy amount of blood and guts. Director Toby Wilkins keeps the storyline to traditional survival mode, with three people stuck in an isolated gas station, trying to stay alive amidst a surprisingly original (considering the genre) parasite infection that could easily make Evil Dead’s possessed limb cower in shame and call it “daddy dearest”. The shivers come in by the dozen, thanks mostly to the sound and special effects crew comprising Sandy Gendler, David Stevens, Ozzy Alvarez and Danielle Noe. If only the Academy could quit sodomizing its credibility and give props to the deserving. Golden Compass had the best visual effects in 2008, my foot.
Slither: James Gunn’s Slither feels like a remake of a Seventies cult film. Strangely, there is neither some piss-poor, lowly-produced blaxploitation version of it nor a really entertaining John Carpenter version. At best, Slither is a glossy tribute to David Cronenberg’s Shivers. Since the director Gunn comes nowhere close to channelling the brilliance of Cronenberg’s sexual undertones, he does the next best thing – he pokes fun at it. Some of the stuff in here is hilarious (not hilariously bad i.e. a Chuck Norris film). Mayor Jack MacReady, played by erstwhile blues musician Gregg Henry, walks away with the best punchlines. He cusses and spits, thoroughly pissed off that his town has been taken over by sex-crazed “outer-space fuckers”. The aliens are pretty funny too. One of them even gets in one of those “I’ve been around a million years…you think you can fuck with me?” lines. Defintely one of the funniest horror films of 2008.
The Final Destination: Final Destination 4 is so bad that I hear that some of the death scenes weren’t even a part of the original script. The actors simply killed themselves out of embarrassment. I would have too, if I hadn’t bought a pirated version of it.
Everything we pretend to hold sacred now will probably be forgotten over a loud sneeze or less than remarkable orgasm ten years from now. Still we have trouble letting go. Money, sex, career, religion, morals, perversions and other things that go don’t go quietly into the night. Sometimes, not giving a shit helps. Even then it is inevitable that one day we’ll wake up, fully aware that it’s just another day to trick ourselves into believing that life has expectations we need to meet; little check points we need to cross in order to die peacefully, knowing that the life and love we once held didn’t go to waste after all.
Boris Yellnikoff knows this and lets us know that he does. He whines about dumb kids who can’t move chess pieces properly, a failed marriage to what’s-her-name, his nemisis – the Nobel Prize, slow moving senior citizens and the lack of enlightened cynicism in today’s society. In Whatever Works, Larry David plays him to perfection. Much like the director of this film – Woody Allen – he takes his character’s gloomy perspective of life a little too seriously. It phsyically shows too. In fact, one of the most entertaining aspects of Whatever Works is the way Boris walks. Prose and poetry collide every time he drags himself to carry out inane chores. Boris’ disgruntled swaying of his three functional limbs (the third lived through a suicide attempt and barely survived to tell the tale) is the accurate and exact synonym of the word Swagger. I almost wanted to land a nasty kick on his good leg and tell him to lie down; only because I didn’t want Boris to suffer the ignominy of existence any more than he himself did .
Living, for this man, is suffering.
Suffering, for me, is the stupid-ass, embarassingly convenient ending.
Everything else is a fucking ball of sunshine. Especially Larry David trying to educate Evan Rachel Wood about her flaws, Ed Begley’s hilarious ramblings at the pub, Patricia Clarkson’s shedding her Stepford suit to become an exaggerated bohemian cliche, and Woody Allen’s sharpish dialogues.
Rapper Tech9ne (Aaron Dontez Yates) is hardcore. Backed by the incendiary beats provided by Strange Music label’s array of DJs, he rips into the mic, spitting vicious rhymes about street violence, social chaos and religion – the kind that is delicately referred to as “deep shit”. Even though his recent album King Of Darkness (K.O.D) album has Tech9ne waxing contemplative more than ever before, he still sounds more visceral than your average hardcore rapper. Show Me A God is my favourite of the lot, with it swayin between Jeru Damaja and Bizzy Bone’s finest moments. Take notes DMK, rhyming breed with bleed and barking like a dog isn’t scary (if it were, Nicholas Mastandrea’s Breed would not have sucked so much), trying to find a god in a beast or a broad…now that’s pretty friggin scary.
*****
People don’t realize how edgy the Motown artists once were. From Sly Stone and Otis Redding to Eddie Kendricks and Brenda Holloway, these unruly men and women of soul not only coaxed music to transcend colour, but also form and shape. The Temptations, Motown’s favorite family, have made a lot of great soulful and funky music throughout their five-decade old career and have gone through more band members than Spinal Tap would have bothered to count. Their 1969 album Cloud Nine sparked the birth of their psychedelic soul sound and also a rumour that the group was trying to adopt Sly Stone’s sinfully funky production style; the title track has them on the dancefloor, bleeding harmonies and sweating a nasty groove. Just remember kids, giving in to temptations can have wonderful repercussions; getting out it, however, sucks. A lot.
*****
There’s this bloke I know from office who is tremendously fond of pop music. He gets drunk on conversations about popular pop rock bands that sucked during the Eighties. Journey, Boston, Firehouse, Simon and Garfunkel, Foreigner, Dire Straits and a couple of other bands I seriously despise. He claims that simplicity blows him away. Well, it blows something alright; of course, that’s not to say that sugary lyrics, gentle acoustic strumming and innocuous melodies don’t turn me on sometimes. Stars, a Montreal-based, four-piece indie pop band, do just that. They make pretty music that even has loathsomely wry users of Wikipedia terming it as “lush instrumentation, nimble production and mixing, narrative lyrics, and soft but nuanced vocals.” Having only heard their Comeback EP, I don’t want to hype these little buggers too much, but for what it’s worth – simple, lovely songs like The Aspidistra Flies and Krush have made me seriously reconsider the pop styling of Simon and Garfunkel. Don’t worry, I’ll still hate Journey and Firehouse with every fiber in my body.
*****
Ain’t it funny how almost every worthwhile Nirvana song (except Lithium and Dumb) is a cover song of some erstwhile alternative rock band that got lost during the MTV-sponsored grunge movement of the 1990s? Well, it’s funny because the man who couldn’t compose a single decent riff or pen a meaningful lyric was hailed as the savior of music only because he blew his head off despite being able to afford dental insurance for his wife, her mistress and their two cats. Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam is one of the songs he took and made a mess off. Indie poppers The Vaselines’ original version is awesome because it refused to be pigeonholed into any genre. It swiftly moves through roots music, folk, alternative rock and into that thin, metallic sound that can be found on Bob Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album. Just so you know, wearing Flannel ain’t grunge. Not giving a fuck that you’re wearing Flannel aint grunge either. Knowing that Mudhoney’s Mark Arm came up with the word “grunge” while Nirvana merely bastardized the genre and led it to its demise…well, that’s a start.
This blog will keep switching between film reviews and music-related tidbits until something really big explodes and I get sufficiently distracted. Also, I don’t update as much nowadays only because I continue to torment myself by getting up every morning to pursue a life I’m not really fond of.
Thanks for reading, now quickly run to other side and get a haircut or something.
Moon: Cinema has a sense of irony that has recently become predictable. It is simple mathematics, really. For example, Al Pacino x Robert Deniro = enough proof method acting does not age with grace or Catherine Zeta Jones + human/animal/plant/heavy machinery = awful. Thankfully, not all make you want to puke. One particularly gratifying arithmetic I figured out was that low budget science fiction = awesome. Now, I normally don’t fancy sci fi films. Most of them are a fruity lot, with their deliberate attempts at raising oohs and ahhs through CGI effects and elaborately silly plots. Cascading orchestral music, bullshit theories, unreasonable plot twists and so on. Somehow low budget sci fi movies such as Primer, Pi and Cube seem to rise above that shit and instead present spectacular situations that are wonderful and scary to imagine only because they could happen…uhmmm tomorrow.
Duncan Jones’ Moon is probably the second best of its kind I have seen (Shane Carruth’s Primer is a few inches ahead). It tells a tale of an astronaut – Sam Bell – getting ready to head back to earth after spending nearly three years on the moon, servicing equipment for a multi-national energy company. Sam Rockwell tunes in a riveting one-man show. His character’s slow descent into mental and physical deterioration could pass for a long-ass music video of Eels’ Electro Shock Blues album. Quirky, lonely and melancholic. Kevin Spacey is delightfully inconspicuous as Gerty – the robot; a strange mix between Marvin the Paranoid Android and Mother Goose.
Clint Mansell’s original score and Gary Shaw’s cinematography are intoxicating; the combination of both dam near drove me into a hallucinatory state an hour into the film. As for the twist, well…there is a semblance of one. Matter of fact, director Duncan Jones could have saved the twist for the climax and the movie would have still been pretty darn great. The fact that he gives it away in the middle and still keeps our minds itching with pleasure until the end is a testament to just how fucking great Moon turned out anyway.
Juice: As far as I can tell, John Singleton’s Boyz N The Hood brought hyper-realistic violence to the blaxploitation genre. The early Nineties spawned a bunch of films about kids trying to get out of the muck of poverty and gang-related violence. I’m sure most of them had perfectly decent intentions of bringing to light America’s most awkward misnomer – their country’s perception of the black man. What they ended up doing (at least to a brown-skinned boy sitting in front of the tele) instead is furthering the caricature. While it isn’t as bad as Menace To Sobriety (yes I hated it), it still is a far cry from Boyz N The Hood. Juice sometimes works, but only because of Tupac Shakur’s crazed antics and Eric B and Rakim’s fantastic title song Juice (Know The Ledge). Also, check out Singleton’s Higher Learning. Much much better.
Plague Town: This is David Gregory’s first full-length feature film and hopefully will be the last one until he gets a bigger budget. A lot of horror films have been wonderfully executed on shoestring budgets, but Plague Town isn’t one of them. The girl with the pale white mask gets the creep factor going for awhile, but soon you realize that she looks like a brooding Slipknot fan.The ending is lame too. Give this one a miss, but for Romero’s sake, don’t give up on indie horror.
Clapton, Page, Iommi and a few other guitarists have truly made me feel horrendous for being cursed with stubby fingers. As for Mark Knopfler, he was never a guitar god to me. At best, he was a gentle gargoyle who made pop rock songs that could have helped Michael in his quest to rock. Their songs had great melodies and all, but nothing that could justify their legendary status. The Sailing to Philadelphia album marked the first time I heard the Mark Knopfler sound and went, “woaaaw cool”. On Junkie Doll, his vocals and guitar bring out the beast in him. It starts off a good blues track that flirts with greatness during its quieter moments and by the time the subdued solo kicks in, it strips itself naked and fucks with awesome…and leaves without giving a phone number. Oh yeah badass.
*****
Archie Bronson Outfit had me dancing two summers ago. Their first video – Dart For My Sweetheart – was so much fun that I thought they were an amateur garage band looking for some sweet YouTube fame. When I realized just how tight and frigging catchy they were, I went around asking my friends to give up Jesus and instead let Archie Bronson Outfit into their hearts. The spiritual payoff might not be great, but the joy of incessantly tapping your feet to four minutes of Hendrix-influenced garage pop goodness is something you should seriously consider. Overhype besides, if you don’t find yourself nodding your head to the ‘Nah nanana nah nah ahhhh” groove, start sniffing around for vampires. You are Van Helsing. You are hollow.
*****
Born unto this world as Troy Donald Jamerson, Pharoahe Monch probably has the whitest name ever for a rapper from Queens. Thankfully, that hasn’t stopped him from ripping through a vicious cover of a classic Public Enemy rhyme. Just so you know, Pharoahe Monch’s gnarly version of Welcome To The Terrordome smokes the original. One of the most adrenaline-fuelled political hip hop songs like ofmygod ever.
*****
I used to associate French electronic duo Air with their 1998 single Sexy Boy. It was a truly awful piece of kitschy music. As it turned out, Sexy Boy never happened again. Matter of fact, I don’t think I have heard a bad Air track since then. From the breezy melodies in All I Need and Kelly Watch The Stars that make my ears want to dance to the eerily sober and sophisticated harmonies in Cherry Blossom Girl and La Femme d’Argent, they all seem so dam likeable. Their contribution to Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides‘ soundtrack is a collection of their finest and most fragile moments. It really doesn’t get any better than Playground Love. Just listen to that saxophone solo explode with love.
Zombieland: Zombies used to be funny because they weren’t really scary. Nobody ever appreciated a George Romero film during the Seventies because it frightened them. You’d have to be the in-bred child of a hysterical Jellyfish and an agoraphobic Pomeranian to actually fear those zombies. By the time Nineties hit, zombies had become more efficient. They changed their plan of attack; sprinting instead of walking real slow, ambushing their victims and such. Some even carried guns while others had ferocious pets. Their sense of irony seemed nastier than ever before too. Films such as 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend and those George Romero remakes took themselves seriously, as was evidenced by their emotionally-cathartic climaxes and at least one genuine attempt at being mushy.
Enter Ruben Fleischer’s Zombieland. Nearly 87 minutes of back-slapping and sometimes stomach-aching fun. Not since Simon Peg’s outrageously original Shaun Of The Dead has a monster movie been this funny. Jesse Eisenberg (Columbus) is actually Woody Allen trapped in a 24-year-old indie actor’s body. Seriously, if Mr Allen was about 180 years younger and stuck in middle of a zombie wasteland, he’d act just like this. Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin act all unnecessarily mature, but it makes sense given their characters’ survival instincts. A minor quibble, if it qualifies as one, but more and more I have started to believe that Abigail won’t play the Bee Girl in Blind Melon’s comeback music video and that’s just sad.
Woody Harrelson is Tallahassee – a kamikaze killer a.k.a random zombie’s worst nightmare. His anger management issues are pure hilarity as is his obsession with Twinky bars; and I can’t even begin to mention how awesome that 5-second banjo tribute to John Boorman’s Deliverance was. The star of Zombieland however is Bill Murray who makes a cameo appearance as himself. If John Hurt deserved an Oscar for 15 minutes of acting in History of Violence, then Bill Murray needs to be given at least two-thirds of a Polynesian Island and a lifetime supply of medical marijuana for the awesomeness he brings to Zombieland for about ten minutes.
As for the storyline, well here you go…two guys, two girls, 33 rules, and one zombie apocalypse. Bring it fucking on.
Million Dollar Baby: I hate the second and third sections of Hotel California. Don Henley and the gang hardly do anything to break up the monotony of the rhythm that gets tiring after 2 minutes. When the song eventually does take a turn, it is in the form of THE lamest solo ever. Clint Eastwood gets the audience nodding to a pretty decent groove for about 75% of Million Dollar Baby; neither spectacular nor terrible, just a bland sports film about a working-class heroine. The last half-an-hour of the film is cringe-worthy. I’m talking about “Step Mom” bad here, people. I wanted to rip that dam respirator tube out of Hilary Swank and throw it at Paul Haggis. First Crash, now this. Have a heart, man.
Saving Private Ryan & ET: Guns don’t kill people, Steven Spielberg kills people. Only Paul Haggis and the irritating couple sitting behind us in the theatre would enjoy this sort of crap.
Braveheart: At least for national security purposes, the last scene in Braveheart with Mel Gibson screaming “FREEDOM” needs to be kept in a top-secret vault. With more and more people binging on hallucinogens and sedatives these days, it is only a matter of time before the truth serum becomes impotent; either that or terror mongers will start realizing how well it goes with whole grain bread and start becoming immune to it. Don’t panic, Mel Gibson has given us a secret weapon.
“Which embassy are you planning to blow up tomorrow?” (Silence) “I said, which fucking embassy you fucking planning to blow up tomorrow, you terrorist fuck?” (Silence) “Play that last scene from Braveheart again” (Noooooooooooooo)
Dead Poets Society: Giving Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society an Oscar for best screenplay is like giving one of those dudes who design gnarly cigarette packets a Nobel Peace Prize for promoting cancer awareness. Some of the dialogues involving Robin Williams waxing whimsical about transcendentalism are so awful that I got the shivers. The torment continues with his pseudo-rebellious students attacking conformism by vying for a spot in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Are you friggin kidding me? We should have known that the once great Peter Weir had lost his mind when he chose Harrison Ford for a lead role. Twice.
Shrink: Kevin Spacey has been misconceieved as one of most talented American actors of our generation. Maybe it has to do with all the really cool characters he gets to play. Just to set the record straight, he neither ad-libbed the final speech in American Beauty nor did he impulsively straighten his limbs and walk out of the police station as Kaiser Soze. If you ask me, both Chris Cooper and Gabriel Byrne acted circles around him in those films. Yes, he was good in Seven; I’m sure the staleness of Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman did wonders to his confidence. In Shrink, the character he plays brings out the worst in him. Awkward, boring and full of chicken soup for everyone’s soul. Jonas Pate’s film about the quasi-tragic life of a celebrity psychiatrist/ best-selling author isn’t any better. It swallows any semblance of talent that its actors might have and spits out the bits that matter. Then there’s Dallas Roberts playing a second-rate House MD-type guy and the desecration of Mary Jane. Please stop the pain.
Scent Of A Woman: I’ll let Tony Montana handle this one.
School of Seven Bells is a curiously poppy and notoriously gothic 3-piece band from New York. I sort of like them but I doubt if I’d grow any fonder of them and that’s only because Bat For Lashes and Cocteau Twins already exist. However, their track School Of 73 Bells featuring hip hop producer Prefuse 73 is unadulterated awesomeness. With tightly-woven beats and dream-like vocals from twins Alejandra and Claudia Deheza, it could so easily be that song to which I wake up, smiling and knowing that it’s a Saturday.
*****
Brown Bag All Stars comprise MCs Audible Doctor, J57, KONCEPT, Soul Khan and Cold Codein. Their debut The Brown Tape is a collection of gimmick-free hip-hop tracks that beg, borrow and steal from the golden era of rap with new school production values. While redundancy slightly creeps in towards the last few tracks of their album, it certainly doesn’t linger long enough to discredit all the fun we would have had until then. Think Wu Tang without the grime and kung fu. Think Run DMC with actual rhythm and clever wordplay. Or just think of those catchy rap songs that make you want to throw a punch, plant a kiss, and shake a leg at the same time.
*****
It is easy to trash Eagles of Death Metal, I guess. Silly band name…check. Stupid leather outfits…check. Unnecessarily vague songs titles…double check. Thank heavens some of their music is so much fun that I want Danny McGill back on that MTV Top 10 show, introducing Faith No More’s Real Thing as the numero uno song of the week. In 2006, after an unruly Ohio crowed booed them off stage, Axl Rose publicly referred to EODG as the “Pigeons Of Shit Metal”. Well, if you absolutely hated Water Pistols and Voodoo Lilies and the putrid glam rock they were popular for, listen to Eagle Goth. At least you won’t feel guilty about headbanging to nonsensical rock.
*****
Alternative supergroup Zwan is the collective decision taken by Billy Corgan, Jimmy Chamberlin (Smashing Pumpkins), Matt Sweeney (famed guitarist and producer), David Pajo (Slint ) and Paz Lenchantin (A Perfect Circle) to evolve the sounds they had discovered from their previous bands.
Djali Zwan is an acoustic incarnation of Zwan. Featuring Ana Lenchantin (Paz’s sister), they crafted exquisite lo-fi gems that walks the line between alt country and the sort of indie folk that is considered cool nowadays. Their version of Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast is surreal; I didn’t even know it was a cover until Jerry noticed it during the opening credits of Spun. In fact when you hear the vocalist gently weep, “I’m coming back, I will return, I will possess your body and I’ll make you burn”, you just might want to take back all those ‘I wish Iron Maiden never existed’ prayers. Too bad Zwan called it quits so soon.
Life: I’m neither a fan of Eddie Murphy nor Martin Lawrence. Give me Katt Williams, Anthony Anderson or Dave Chappelle any day of the week. Thankfully, director Ted Demme’s Life doesn’t aspire to be one of those bid-budget comedies, it just happens to find irreverent humour in tragic situations. Eddie and Martin excel in their roles; the two ‘legendary’ comedians act their little hearts out like never before and sadly never after. The film starts off as a buddy comedy about two African American New Yorkers – one a hustler (Ray Gibson), the other an aspiring bank teller (Claude Banks) – landing in jail, thanks to a dead body and the apathetic American legal system. So Claude, an otherwise straight-edge guy, is sentenced along with Ray to a lifetime’s worth imprisonment at the infamous Camp 8 in Mississippi. Of course, he doesn’t plan on forgiving Ray anytime soon for leading him so far astray from the life he had planned.
Anderson, Bernie Mac, Obba Babatunde, Miguel Núnez play fellow prisoner stuck under sweltering Mississippi sun. Bernie is especially friggin hilarious as Jangle Leg; his random muttering is the stuff that a Jerry Lewis skit could have been built around. Also, Nick Cassavetes, writer of Alpha Dog and Blow, is wicked as Sergeant Dillard – a character you would love to hate, but just can’t seem to find the reason to. Things really pick up when Ray and Claude get into a heated argument and decide that they in fact hate each other. The film then changes its pace and colour and becomes an idyllic prison drama in which only cynicism towards death has a genuinely funny punchline.
At one point the narrator mentions how he “didn’t see nothing special the first time Ray and Claude walked into the cage. They were just a couple of fools whose luck had run out”. Initially, I didn’t see much I liked about the film either, but unlike its real counterpart, Life evolves into something better than most people give it credit for.
The Hamiltons: Good independent horror films are surprisingly easy to find. The reason why so many of them work so well is because their directors do everything they can to defy the accepted norms of giving us chills and thrills. Gone are tediously predictable bloodbaths, little girl ghosts, celebrity cameos and overblown CGI effects (or at least desperate attempts of having such); instead a craving for conspicuously deranged storylines, with minimal gloss and a fetish for understating evil gave rise to the indie horror genre.
The Hamiltons, directed by Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores a.k.a The Butcher Brothers, tells a tale of four orphaned siblings trying to make sustain a normal household in American suburbia. The eldest David (Samuel Child) is the breadwinner, desperate to be the glue that keeps the family together; the twins – Wendell (Joseph McKelheer) and Darlene (Mackenzie Firgens) – are the creepiest of lot, with their sociopathic behavior proving to be more and more dangerous. The youngest – Francis (Cory Knauf) – is the odd sibling out and for reasons far more unpredictable and gloomier than one would imagine. The only thing that slightly irked me was the hype of the climax that I had eagerly bought from Bloody Disgusting website’s (my bad, not theirs) glowing review of the film.
See, Bloody Disgusting is the one place that I consistently go to for feeding on horror films…they have an excellent archive of lesser known stuff, as well as pretty convincing reviews that make me want to torrent whatever they praise, but I thought they sort of overrated the “big” secret at the end. Matter of fact I thought the climax was absolutely perfect only because it lacked a proper twist that might have left me with a bad aftertaste. When a film moves at such a pace, it is only fitting that it ends with a whimper – one that warms the audience to the whimsies of indie filmmaking while keeping in close quarters all the ingredients that make for a fantastic horror film.
Sick Girl: Just so you know, I have always hated the ‘torture porn’ tag that new age slasher flicks have learnt to live and die by. It just sounds friggin vile; might as well lump shitty romantic comedies into the ‘scat porn’ category. Well, Eben McGarr’s Sick Girl is proof that independent, unpaid critics are idiots who jump to conclusions and more importantly, gives validity to calling such films as “torture porn”. See, my croonies, it is common knowledge that sex and pain are bedmates and even the wantonly dumb Chicks on Flicks on Sony Pix would tell you that cinema is one voyeuristic bastard. Imagine if you must…a bunch of cash-strapped people sitting in front of their laptops and getting strangely aroused by brutal acts of violence committed on people who sure do scream a lot. Remember James Wan’s Saw and how excited we were about the climax? A nice enough chap mutilated in front of our eyes and whose only ray of hope is extinguished with the speed and velocity of a Japanese freight train and all that most of us could say was, “oh that shit’s just fucking cool”. Even if the arousal probably had nothing to do with sexual desire, it still indicative of the extent that we, humans, would go in search of stimulation.
Having said all that, director Eben McGarr doesn’t just bait the audience with blood, gore and clumsy violence. There is a pretty interesting story that binds all the severed human bits together. The principle characters – Izzy (Leslie Andrews), Barney (John McGarr) and Kevin (Charlie Trepany) – are tremendous, as well. Leslie, in particular, is super fucking gnarly as Izzy Shea – the psychotic sister who guards her kid brother and her home in small rural town near California while waiting for her elder brother Rusty to find his way back from the war. I’m telling you, she could bitchslap The Bride, O-Ren Ishii and the entire cast of Charlie Angels with one arm tied behind her back. I really dug John McGarr’s character too; he plays a kind-hearted biker who happens to be the only other person Izzy allows to befriend her little brother Kevin.
The extent of graphic violence in Sick Girl could have been toned down slightly; Izzy going berserk on the teenagers towards the end is a bit hard to stomach. Leaps and bounds better than any of those stupid teen slasher movies, but falls just short of forming a really good argument against the ungainly ‘torture porn’ tag. Now all I have to figure out is whether that’s a good thing.
Borderland: Zev Berman’s Borderland is another film that shows how twisted and vulnerable the human psyche can be. There is even the obligatory ‘based on a true story’ line, just to remind us that the stuff that these directors think of pales in comparison to the shit that happens in real life. I’ll keep this one short…three friends go to a colourful town near the US-Mexican border to (a) get laid (b) get drunk (c) get laid again. Instead of the expected binge, they (a) get their skulls opened (b) get their limbs mutilated (c) get on the bad side of a human sacrifice cult. For what it’s worth, the torture sequence with the hapless police officer is truly cringe-worthy. His other film Briar Patch seems much more interesting. Borderland – strictly recommended for those who enjoyed a good meal while watching Hostel.
The Commitments: I really really wanted to like Alan Parker’s The Commitments – a film about an aspiring soul band in Dublin looking to make waves in pop culture at the behest of their manager. Most of the actors in the film are actually real-life members of the band The Commitments, so like the dude in IMDB tells us – “the key players in this movie were not chosen for their acting abilities, but rather for their musical talent”. In case you didn’t know, Alan Parker is the dude who directed Pink Floyd’s The Wall movie, the excellent Mathew Modine-starrer Birdy and Midnight Express. Hold on, I have got one more…the film was based on a Roddy Doyle novel!
Despite all these delightfully awesome details, something went wrong that made the film less enjoyable than I had hoped. Maybe the music (as good as it actually is) totally overshadowed the storyline. Maybe the humour was too one-sided to remain funny after an hour. Whatever it was, it dulled my senses towards the film.
Like I said, the music is pretty good (the singer sounds a lot like Joe Cocker) and none of the characters overstay their welcome, but towards the end I was left with the feeling of ‘meh could have been better”. Colm Meaney, who plays Elvis enthusiast Jimmy Rabbit Sr., gets in the best line of the film – “That’s fuckin’ blasphemy. Elvis wasn’t a Cajun”. Now everybody get your hands on Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People.
Some bands deserve more than just a paltry mention. So let me start over again…Portland indie rockers The Decemberists make fantastic music that pauses every 20 seconds to consider metamorphosing into something more menacing. Sometimes it does and with sound and fury, gnashing its teeth and escaping most clichés; and sometimes it doesn’t, but stays just as captivating, with its affinity for ethereal lovemaking over a lush soundscape.
Colin Meloy, Chris Funk, Jenny Conlee, Nate Query and John Moen christened themselves as The Decemberists in 2000, having shared an equal fondness and fascination for the Decembrist uprising in Russia and fellow indie bands – Norfolk and Western, Camera Obscura, Long Winters and The Shins. While their music does bear similarities to their influences, it really does elevate itself by constantly evolving.
After a slew of mostly acoustic, accordion-based tracks and the erstwhile foray into 12-string guitar madness on their previous albums, The Decemberists have now tackled hard rock opera to the ground with dissonant ease. Their 2009 album The Hazards Of Love is the bastard child of The Who’s Tommy and the cult-tastic Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea album. As we know, when storytelling meets clever chord progressions, music shakes it little butt and struts off into the sunset, looking prettier and more seductive than ever before.
The album recites a haunting story of a woman named Margaret who “falls in love with a shape-shifting boreal forest dweller named William.” The villains – a jealous forest queen and an ensemble of unruly characters – bring gnarly darkness to the story and appropriately make for the brightest moments.
The sonic horizon of The Hazards Of Love also seems broader than ever, with gorgeous vocal performances by Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond and Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond. Bless these angels for reaffirming my faith (and another friend of mine) in female-fronted alternative rock music. Not often has this genre seen the species do it justice. “The Queen’s Rebuke” is a glorious testament to the oestrogen-fuelled awesomeness.
Imagine, a deliciously modern twist of a Led Zeppelin’s The Battle of Evermore, with Robert Plant replaced by a pissed off Patti Smith; and I mean, raging, frothing and restrained all at once. As a thunderous riff rides on the spine of ethereal backing vocals, Shara Worden croons, “And you have removed this temptation that’s troubled my innocent child, To abduct and abuse and to render her rift and defiled. But the river is deep to the banks and the water is wild. But I will fly you to the far side” and lets you go to sleep, dreaming about great tree monsters preaching to a congregation of lepers and deaf children, but that’s just me. And Jenny Conlee is insanely great as the keyboardist. I would love to hear these guys cover Light My Fire just to see Conlee rip into that organ sound.
The mesmerizing The Hazards of Love 3 features an eerie harpsichord tune performed by a children’s choir. I have been gorging myself on it for over a week now and it has become a prelude for most of my daily chores. I don’t what it is but there’s something appealing about angelic vocals singing, “Father I’m not feeling well, must be the flowers you fed, they tasted spoiled for suddenly I find that I am dead. But father don’t you fear, your children all are here, singing ohhhh, the hazards of love” while I procrastinate about deadlines at work. Oh, and I am almost sure that many cute instruments were injured during the making of this track.
Matter of fact, many silly theories about indie music have been knocked the fuck out after the release of Hazards Of Love. The Decemberists have done their bit to fade to black the pretentions and egomaniacal jackass-ery of the genre and its tendency to fall in love with itself.
Stand up, kindly sirs and sisters of indie rock, and be proud…if the world ignores you any longer, it is only to preserve your rare gift for creating beauty in silence and to a chosen crowd of those who either shake a fist or shed a tear at the current social and artistic dystopia.
Vanishing Point: I dig neither speed nor metal. The combination of both on a desolate highway gets me as excited as a rabid wolverine at a veggie salad bar. This is why I used to sneer at anyone who asked me watch Richard Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. Imagine…a film about a half-maverick half-psychotic driver called Kowalski who is set to deliver a 1970 Dodge Challenger drives from Colorado to San Francisco with a tagline that says “it’s the maximum trip at maximum speed”. Hell, I thought I’d be laughing during the course of film, thinking about when some shitty Kenny Loggins song is going to disrupt an even shittier chase sequence.
Vanishing Point is probably the only film about cars that I have ever liked (apart from Rajasekar’s Patti Sollai Thattathe which kinda ruled). Finally I have something intelligible to utter other than ‘oh wow’ or ‘uhhh I see’ whenever my friends or colleagues start babbling about Choppers, Porsches and that questionably invigorating vrooooom sound that one of those BMW cars make. Instead of pretending to give a shit, now I can try my best to look cool and say, “go watch Vanishing Point fuckers.” Having said that, avoid the 1997 remake with Viggo Mortensen like you would the monkey plague, it makes Torque seem watchable.
The sound production and cinematography were two of the biggest reasons (along with the storyline or rather the lack of one) as to why the original seemed vastly superior. The sound reminded me of those old Seventies rock albums on audiotapes… frantic, crafty and a little murky, but attractively so. The soundtrack itself is all kinds of awesome; little surprise it is that Quentin Tarantino hails this film as one of his inspirations. On the visual front, cinematographer John Alonzo has had his way with the vast landscape of the highway and the sweltering sun up in the sky; no real surprise that over the next few decades, he would continue to inspire beauty in visually-stunning films such as Chinatown and Grass Harp. The detour that the driver takes into the sandy desert is beautifully done, with the tyre marks forming mysterious patterns that make a whole of sense when seen in retrospect. I’m also really glad that the Kowalski character (aptly played by Barry Newman) wasn’t prone to theatrics; no overtly heroic deeds, no moral dilemma and mercifully, no ‘ooh naked lady on the bike, must woo and screw” and “dam rattlesnake, must kill you with my fingernails” scenes.
Blind radio jockey Super Soul (Cleavon Little), free-spirited chopper rider Angel (Timothy Scott) and the Prospector (Dean Jagger) play the kind, decidedly crazy souls who come to Kowalski’s aid. Despite the redundancy of their collective liberal state of mind, they really do fit in with the grander scheme of things – Kowalski’s journey. Let me pull the curtains down on this one with a comment by some bloke called Tom Darwin from IMDB…“stop wondering why Kowalski, on his quest for speed, is always being overtaken and passed by other vehicles; just put your brain on neutral, put your popcorn where it’s handy, and buckle up.”
Lymelife: Indie films make me feel all fuzzy and warm. No matter how emotionally overblown or fantastically silly they are, most of them are perfect precursors for lazy Sunday siestas. The commonalities between them range from the lucidity in which the frames move from one to another and gratuitously ambitious soundtracks chockfull of bisexual alt-country guitarists to anticlimactic and most often abrupt endings and random A-list guest appearances. Some of them become so full of themselves that they actually end up making that uneasy transformation into big-screen blockbusters; even so, they still remain cutely apologetic of such popularity. Case in point, Little Miss Sunshine and Juno to a lesser extent. Derick Martini’s Lymelife is one of the least interesting indie films I have seen over the past few years, but that probably has more to the do with the quality of similar films. While it doesn’t even begin to sniff the greatness that is the list of indie gems such as Station Agent, Mean Creek, Thumbsucker, Igy Goes Down and many others, Lymelife still gets a minor thumbs up on the weight of few its actors.
Cynthia Nixon doesn’t count because she is a regular on that terrible sitcom. Oh yes people, there are certain things artists do that just cannot be forgiven. She could crap Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony Movement on cue, but I’d still hold that ‘Sex In The City’ card against her. Alec Baldwin is convincing as the assholish husband, but in the later parts of the film when he has to be more of a husband than an asshole, it seems a little less believable.
The cake, if I had any, would undoubtedly go to Kieran Culkin who plays Jimmy Bartlett, a kid desperately seeking a young lassie by the name of Adrianna (Emma Roberts) and solace from his dysfunctional family. Timothy Hutton has a neat role too; he plays the Lyme-diseased Charlie Bragg who suffers just as many migraines as bouts of nagging from his wife. Most of all, I dug the ending and its lack of melodrama. Sort of like the Requiem For A Dream climax, but without the drug-infested gloom permeating the piteous decay of humanity.
The Big Nothing: Almost everyone reading this by now probably knows at least three of Ross’ girlfriends. They’d never admit it because lord knows – it is seriously uncool for an intellectual to confess to having seen at least one million out the eleventy billion episodes of F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Who in their insidiously pretentious mind in fact would? For someone who can probably hold his own in a trivia about the sitcom, I can safely say that Ross was one of the few characters I could watch without feeling the urge to stick a café mocha up my superfluous ass. I even liked that Run Fat Boy Run movie that had David Schimmer directing Simon Pegg and Hank Azaria! I like this one better and it has Mr Pegg in it too, but funnier, darker and more in tune with what made him completely awesome in Shaun Of The Dead.
In Jean Baptiste Andrea’s The Big Nothing, Schwimmer plays Charlie, a former professor who gets fired on his first day at a call center. Enter Gus (Simon Pegg), a scam artist who almost isn’t clever enough to count as one and former pageant queen Josie (Alice Eve) who convince Charlie to join them in a seemingly “snag-free plan to make some cash” involving Internet porn and men of cloth.
Of course things go wrong; with hearts, promises, arms, words and skulls broken all at once. The climax did take more turns than I had cared for, but the final frame in which…well, you’ll see…works wonderfully well. Schwimmer and Pegg are funny as hell, especially the first time their characters meet. Something about Gus is so perversely pathetic that you want to slap really hard before telling him that things might be ok after all. Charlie is just one of those characters you end up feeling sorry for; then months after watching the film, one fine day you’d wake up finally understanding why you probably shouldn’t have.
The film Requiem For A Dream and a distinct lack of sobriety once introduced me to the haunting sounds of Kronos Quartet. Violins gratuitously meshed with their fellow strings and beat themselves to a bloody, self-loathing pulp that spoke of the mistakes made by the film’s sordid characters. In a perfect world, I’d be amazed if you hadn’t heard of David Harrington, John Sherba, Hank Dutt and Jeffrey Ziegler until now. However given our world and its abnormal distance from anything any of us would dare call perfect…ladies and gents, introducing The Kronos Quartet.
*****
Pete Philly and Perquisite is an Amsterdam-based duo who make a fascinating blend of hip hop, neo-soul and broken beat jazz. Their first album Mindstate was a concept album, with each track representing a specific state of mind. A bunch of really nice people even awarded their effort with a Zilveren Harp award. ‘Hope’ featuring Talib Kweli was a standout, with its groovy-as-hell vibe and soulful sentiments. Following a sophomore remix album Remindstate, they released Mystery Repeats. Unless I start figuring what the fuss is all about with Mos Def’s new album or some indie rapper breaks the glass ceiling with a ridiculously awesome debut, I doubt that I’m going to listen to a collection of fresher beats in 2009. I swear, I know angels who would have sex to this music. You might want to close your eyes, light up some incense, and hit the loop button; lord knows, a cocktail of Dave Brubeck, DJ Krush, Q Tip, and coolest light-browned skinned MC you have ever heard deserves some incense.
*****
If Cannibal Ox never broke up and instead metamorphosed into a vortex that sucked away the memory of Eminem and the pin-cushioned moron from the criminally-awful ‘come my lady come come my lady” band from our collective consciousness, they’d sound something like Jaime Meline aka EL-P aka former Company Flow rapper.
*****
North England downtempo duo Soulsavers has released their third album (Broken) and second straight one with real godfather of grunge Mark Lanegan. Broken features an impressive list of guest artists including Mike Patton, Jason Pierce and Gibby Haynes, but the real story is that in the track You Will Miss Me When I Burn – Lanegan’s vocals inch closer towards the perfect blend of Tom Waits and Johnny Cash. Please continue deleting all those silly Nirvana songs from your hard disk.
District 9: Aliens have been at the rear end of the deal with cinema. Films with aliens in them fall prey to either predictability or patriotism, both of which have been known to cause unparalleled damage to its kind. Steven Spielberg’s ET made me want to eat my face inside out. I wanted to chew through my cheekbones and pull my eye sockets out through my nostrils every time the camera zoomed in on the ghastly bugger and everyone else in the room went, “awwwwww so cute”. Independence Day was big dumb mediocre fun, but it had its share of unforgivable crimes – especially, the ‘let’s hug it out, you earthling…you’ climax.
Neil Bloomkamp’s District 9 side-steps such irksome details and then some to deliver a kickass film. The coolest part of District 9 is that it never takes itself too seriously; even in the false finishes that threaten to pull the curtains when you least expect it to. It even avoids the shock shtick that such ambitious directors have been known to fawn over. For instance, like Ebert mentions, despite making it clear that Nigerian prostitutes were doing it with the aliens, director Blomkamp merely makes an awkward joke about it and never bothers grossing us out with unnecessarily graphic imagery.
So the deal is that aliens have landed on Earth two decades earlier and after much diplomacy and brain cells-racking, the government of South Africa has decided to put them all in a “militarized ghetto” – where the only rule is that there are no rules…wait, there are a few rules like the aliens can’t purchase cat food without paying for it and kleptomania is generally frowned upon, but you get the picture. Pretty soon the lack of a civil and a maintainable social order in the ghetto drives the government to forcibly evict all the aliens.
Enter Wikus Van D Merwe (Sharlto Copley). A key player and bootlicker unparalleled in a premier ammunitions corporation – Multi-National United – who has been put in charge of the eviction formalities by his father-in-law. From then on, Wikus’ life becomes spectacularly worse than ever before, with aliens and humans conspiring to either kill him or dash his hopes of getting out of this mess, alive, well and almost human.
With an engrossing storyline, a suitable cast (Sharlto is awesome) and tremendous CGI effects, District 9 gets my vote for the ‘flick of the year’. It can’t get any bigger or funner (yes funner) and god bless Nick Blomkamp for that. The only thing dumb about District 9 is that some movie executive in Los Angeles is probably jerking off to the thought of casting Steve Carell in the Hollywood remake. Please fucking don’t.
Public Enemies: Two years ago, the sheer prospect of Christian Bale and Johnny Depp sharing screen space in a gangster film would have had me stalking YouTube and Daily Motion for every user-made promo video. Lately I have turned sour towards both of them. When the initial euphoria of Dark Knight faded away, I became increasingly cynical of it and especially of Bale’s performance. Much like Gerald Butler’s in 300, Bale’s overdubbed voice as Batman really really pissed me off. It sounded like he burped out Clint Eastwood after seven shots of single malt whiskey. In Public Enemies too, he sounds odd. So very odd that you almost forget that Bale is one of the top five method actors in his country; insert Dustin Hoffman quote (if there’s a method, where’s the acting?). As for Johnny Depp, well…part two and three of the Pirate series have made me rethink the whole ‘who’s my favourite American actor” business. If anything, it was a sign of an actor coming to terms with his own celebrity status.
Back to the film…I felt that Public Enemies showcased these two blokes quite poorly. It wasn’t as bad as Pirates III or Terminator IV, but it still was a pretty terrible way of utilizing them; especially considering how good director Michael Mann can be (Collateral).
Unless you have been living under a rock, you’d probably know the storyline by now…so I’ll close with something you might not know. Elliot Goldenthal’s original music for the film is brilliant and I really think you should go out of the way and buy the soundtrack. Matter of fact, it almost takes away the uneasy feeling that you have watched something mediocre by the time the end credits hit the screen.
Bronson: Director Nicolas Winding Refn has gone ahead and carved a nice little niche for himself in European pop cinema. His grim debut Bleeder and the Pusher trilogy have given him enough street credo and maturity to craft something as exquisitely brutal as Bronson. As for actor Tom Hardy, I have only seen him in the recent film adaption of Wuthering Heights, in which he plays Heathcliff. In this film, he plays the awesomely moustached and tough-as-nails – Charles Bronson- England’s most infamous prisoner and general pyschopath extraordinaire.
To call this a tribute to the real-life title character would be a bit short sighted since one gets the impression that it was more of a tribute to pulp cinema. The scenes in which Bronson addresses the crowd, dressed as a clown and drenched in existential ennui, are indicative of the theatrics that daftly help the film avoid genre classifications. The ending however made me feel a bit queasy with the melodrama and all, but as a whole – the film worked very nicely.
However once again, folks, life has asked art to sit the fuck down and observe. In 1994, the real Charles “Charlie” Bronson, whilst holding a guard hostage at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom. In 1998, he asked one of the Iraqis he had held hostage to hit him “very hard” over the head with a metal tray; when he refused, Bronson slashed his own shoulder six times with a razor blade.
Ed Wood: There is something very strangely beautiful about this one. Why, you ask? Johnny Depp stars as the worst film director ever in the history of moving pictures and halfway through decides to start impersonating the bastard child of Michael Jackson and Willy Wonka. Martin Landau plays Bela Lugosi – the actor who was the original Dracula – but with more self-loathing decay. Bill Murray is Bunny Breckinridge – the soon-to-be transvestite perennially getting screwed over by bad luck and worse makeup. Jeffrey Jones is Criswell, the man who can see into the future as long as the TV ratings go up. So that takes care of the strangeness.
As for the beauty, tiny moments of awkward sadness make Tim Burton’s Ed Wood prettier than I had expected it to be. When the character Ed Wood watches Bela Lugosi for the last time, a gloomy ethereal note pierces the scene and threatens to make us feel bad for laughing about them earlier.
Funny thing is in 1980 when this gentle and eccentric man was voted as the worst director of all time, the Carroll Ballard’s tortorously dramatic The Black Stallion won a friggin Special Achievement Award. Probably for making a shitty movie without even an ounce of the dedication that Ed Wood had for his films.
My first introduction to The Shins was through their sophomoric Oh Inverted World album. A friend of mine shared a few mp3s and well, I wasn’t too impressed with their cutesy, willfully ironic indie rock. It was almost as though Franz Ferdinand had been playing their brand of music for many years, but with a bit more bile in their balls and a penchant for experimental histrionics to boot; and who are those Ferdinand fellows really but Coldplay band members who bunked two decades of choir practice to drink coffee and beer at the local pub. Recently, after listening to their Chutes Too Narrow album, I have turned 360 degrees on these Portland lads. While the tracks maintain that grand mushrooming of gentle pop melodies into bursts of sunny, sometimes alarmingly pensive rock anthems, the ghostly rhythms that are gratuitously made to swim amidst them make all the difference.
Saint Simon is one those reasons why music remains as literature’s most cherished companion; some might have believe it’s a warm blanket or a mug of coffee, but to hell with them. I can picture about seven hundred literary characters walk into the sunset with this track playing in the background. Kissing The Lipless could have so easily been that song, which Rent Boy heard before deciding to call it quits on drugs in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. In fact, those precious seconds of psychedelic guitar noodling towards the end could have made him go running back to Mother Superior Swan. Oh indie music, you gloriously inverted, lovable nincompoop…you.
*****
I’m pretty sure you have met Damon Gough. Maybe in the bar, gently mouthing the words to the songs playing in the jukebox or perhaps crossing the road, whistling an old folk tune…hell, you might have even seen him driving a car on the highway, unperturbed by everything but the music blasting from the stereo. See, Damon Gough – also known as Badly Drawn Boy – is one of those kaleidoscopic glitches on the pop industry. He seems just like one of those blokes who couldn’t care less if VH1 wanted to do an episode of Cribs with him; he’d probably tell the host, “don’t touch anything and we’ll be ok”. Don’t we all know people like that?
He even strives to look like the average John despite his unkempt beard and trademark skullcap often threatening to make him a regular face on Billboard countdowns and other tripe endeavors orchestrated by bored marketing gurus at media and publishing companies. He refuses to let his music take its normal course into readily conformist U2-like landscapes of sound, releases an album about once every two years and promotes it with the enthusiasm of a goldfish fighting long-term cancer. Yet, he succeeds…as a musician making unique, pleasant alternative pop music and as an artist earning more than loaf of bread through his dedication to his art form. Pretty decent living, if you ask me. All Possibilities (Have You Fed The Fish?) is an ideal song to start with; funky, joyous and very aware of its distance from reality. Then you should immediately check out the tender and morose Stone In The Water or the gently alluring The Shining (of the fantastic The Hour Of Bewilderbeast). I swear, if I got paid for crafting something as exquisite as that, I would cry. Yup, me = man after all. You = will understand when you listen to it.
*****
Mathew Stephen Ward (M Ward) makes music you can think about Leonard Cohen to. Matter of fact, at times he sounds remarkably like Adam Cohen – offspring of the man who made me forget every other interpretation of Hallelujah but his own (yes, even Jeff Buckley’s). He even channels the spirit of the late Nick Drake in Let’s Dance – the perfect song for the funeral of a lonely dancer.
*****
I must admit that the Coldplay comparison was rather harsh. After all Franz Ferdinand have been known to put out some decent music out there. Some of them even great enough for us to erase the memory of the British pub rock scene getting fucked in the wrong places by Coldplay’s complete nonchalance towards all that is worthy of a second listen. Everybody say hello to the dark side of the manatee.
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