Dir. Terry Zwigoff
2006
Like Ghost World, "Art School Confidential" started as a Daniel Clowes comic in Eightball, but unlike the first narrative, which played itself out over several issues, this was a one-shot, a blast of vitriol aimed directly at the author's own years at the Pratt Institute (we are told, anyway). Teamed up again with Terry Zwigoff, the film molds the screed out into a narrative of sorts, but lacks the warmth or empathy of Ghost World.
It could be that Clowes is much more sympathetic to the girls of Ghost World, but when faced with a male character, more of his self-loathing enters the picture. The Clowes stand-in, Jerome is a good draftsman and illustrator when he gets to art school. His life studies are the best in class. But this is not what art school is about--it's about coming up with a gimmick, sucking cock (as an old, jaded artist played by Jim Broadbent tells him), and working the gallery scene (which I suppose is just more cock-sucking).
Meanwhile there's a strangler on campus claiming lives, a beautiful model (Sophia Myles) to become obsessed about, odd teachers to please (John Malkovich), and assorted character types to react to (my favorite: the Kevin Smith-like film student).
If only Jerome wasn't such a pushover. He's easily led by both instructor and mentor, and in the end isn't even producing his own art (a plot development that feels too much like Enid's ending gambit in Ghost World). I know that Clowes' idea of irony, but if a lot of the best comedy comes out of desperation, Jacob isn't desperate enough.
Now, while watching the film, I laughed and laughed. It is funny, and the scapel-like wit that disects its supporting cast never lets up. But at the end there's not much left to feel.
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May 31, 2006
Art School Confidential
Theater Review: The Dinosaur Within
'Dinosaur' Invites Audiences to Dig
With David Lynch-like moments of crossed realities, John Walch's "The Dinosaur Within" wears influences from the film world on its sleeve. Yet the play, which Theater UCSB is presenting through the weekend, is not a frustrated screenplay. Instead, its numerous time-jumps and parallel narratives push what can be done with theater. By stripping down a convoluted story to a minimalist stage, Mr. Walch's play manages to be complex yet comprehensible.
"The Dinosaur Within" opens with five characters in a tableau, like figures in a natural history museum. They are introduced by a sixth, 12-year-old Tommy (Ryan Lockwood), who addresses us from the podium of the Young Paleontologists Convention. He speaks of evolution, of adapting to survive, of excavating the past and understanding the present. Tommy is introducing the themes of the play, but it's OK, since how these five characters are going to work out these themes is not apparent.
Eli (Carlos Peñuela), a construction worker in Hollywood and an Aborigine who emigrated from Australia, leaves behind a traditional father, Worru (Daniel Flores), and the memory of two deceased older brothers. He's a wannabe actor and a fan of former movie star Honey Wells (Ansley Pierce), who now lives a secluded life in Beverly Hills. Her daughter, Maria (Heather Moiseve), a journalism school dropout, latches onto the newspaper story of some stolen dinosaur footprints, taken from tribal land in the outback.
A chance encounter with Eli makes her follow up the story with its writer, her old journalism professor Jerry (Brennan Kelleher). Rattled by the appearance of his dead son (Tommy, as seen in the introduction), he urges Maria to follow up on the story while he retires to his suburban home and begins to dig up the front porch. Tommy's mysterious disappearance, we discover, was more than 10 years ago and took place in another state. Yet Jerry feels the need to dig.
Perhaps in a film, the numerous overlaps and coincidences would appear too forced, but Mr. Walch's play feels closer to the interweaving melodies and motifs of a symphony, where a phrase in one section is repeated and extrapolated.
So Jerry, commanded by the ghost son to dig, begins to unearth remnants of the bike that Tommy was last seen riding. Just as improbably, Honey Wells begins to receive messages from her past self on a DVD delivered by her youngest fan, Eli. Yet as Eli digs in the ground under Hollywood, he starts to unearth clues to the younger Honey Wells.
Like David Lynch, who uses a higher plane of reality in his fictions to link earthbound tales, Mr. Walch uses Worru's ties to the Aboriginal "Dreamtime," a sort of metaphysical realm, to explain how all these threads connect.
Director Risa Brainin has assembled a solid cast for this production. No one actor stands out, but Mr. Peñuela's Eli may elicit most of the sympathy, mostly from his innocent-abroad appeal.
The big surprise of the night was Alex Knox, who provides comic relief with a selection of spot-on characters. Usually cast as the straight man, Mr. Knox really lets rip. Brennan Kelleher gains believability as his character, Jerry, loses part of his sanity. Ansley Pierce's Honey Wells is a bit too flouncy and brittle at times, but she earns her laughs.
Which brings up another notable element of the play: its confident switch between gut laughs and high emotion. Who expected such an experience at the beginning of summer, a time we reserve for brain-dead blockbusters, piffle and pabulum? "The Dinosaur Within" offers riches for those willing to dig.
X-Men : The Last Stand
Dir. Brett Ratner
2006
As a comic reader (never enough $$ to be a collector) as a kid, my love for tragic stories probably comes from the Dark Phoenix saga of the X-men. Not that I could ever buy that particular "death of Jean Grey" issue, but I could make out what I had missed in the lead-in and the aftermath. It was also their handling of the death later on that turned me against superhero comics right around age 16.
So I do have a soft spot for the X-Men. The fact that Jean Grey could not control her powers, destroys a planet in a frenzy, and is then sentenced to death, finally sacrificing herself lest her lover and her friends step in to stop justice from proceeding, gave me a little look into themes that would be dealt later in more adult literature (though writer Chris Claremont is responsible for a lot of Marvel's maturity). A tragic flaw that cannot be rectified with anything other than death--it paved the way for me to read Hamlet later in high school, etc.
There was also the mind-blowing issue of What If? that examined an alternative universe where Jean Grey did live. The final act of the issue shows Dark Phoenix out of control, annihilating the entire X-men one by one (Kitty Pryde, for example, is blasted into a charred skeleton). It fried my mind! Superheroes don't die, right? But here they were, felled one after the other. This probably also explains my love of stories in which everything goes spiraling downwards, such as the last episode of "Twin Peaks" or something like "Gonin" in which everyone is dead by the end.
So it was heartening to see some of this taken into account for X-Men: the Last Stand, which may not reach the heights of the original saga, but does have its moments. Several main characters die at the hands of Dark Phoenix, and a sense of gloom pervades the film, compared to the good-natured quipping of the first film. It's not often you see an action film where the death of main characters affects the others for the rest of the film--we usually get a scene or two of mourning and then everyone is smiling away again. Not so here.
But there isn't really enough Jean Grey (the beautiful Famke Jannsen) to make us care about her fate--once she joins the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under Magneto, she stands around a lot in a stylish maroon overcoat and bodice and looks upset.
So what we have left are action sequences, and despite being directed by Brett Ratner, they're actually kinda good. So I guess he's learned a bit from the what-the-hell-is-going-on days of Rush Hour. The film even gives us some high quality moments of mainstream surrealism, such as the abandoned lakeside, post-Phoenix, with stones floating in the air, and Jean Grey's childhood house, which is all-a-vibratin' with the potential energy about to be unleashed (boiling Sparklets bottle, floating furniture). It also that should be noted that within a genre where strength is usually all, here the most fearsome characters are the ones with mental agility.
There's a bravura sequence when Magneto rips the Golden Gate Bridge from its moorings and uses it as a footbridge to get to Alcatraz. The quality of the CG is so high that the sequence is neither real nor unreal. It just exists. On the other hand, apart from showing off, it makes no sense--if Magneto has the power to move a suspension bridge, why can't he just levitate his mutant army over the water. Or rent a bus and fly that? Oh well.
To complete my story of my comic-reading years, when Chris Claremont killed off Jean Grey, I bought into it, and it affected me. So when they resurrected her character, I felt betrayed enough to give up on the whole superhero malarkey. Check out this explanation of what 'really' happened when she originally died and returned as Dark Phoenix (from Wikipedia):
It was later revealed that Jean's original body was actually placed into a healing cocoon in the depths of Jamaica Bay and the Phoenix Force helped Jean psionically clone a new body using her genetic template, and then transferred almost all of Jean's mind and soul (save for a few fragments of her spirit which refused to leave Jean's original body) into the cosmically created clone's body. It was the stubborn soul fragments which prompted Phoenix to place her old body in the healing cocoon, as she could not bear to extinguish their spark. Since the Phoenix Force replicated Jean's body so perfectly (and because Phoenix had transferred Jean's mind and soul to her new body), not even Professor X could detect the difference between Jean and the Phoenix.In other words, pure codswallop created after the fact.
I think there's a moment in any boy's life (or girl's, you tell me) where you either call bullshit and grow up, or you accept what they're feeding you and well, I don't know, remain a spotty manchild who plays Magic the Gathering in Borders and you're THIRTY-FUCKING-TWO.
So I called bullshit. And then that summer I discovered Love and Rockets, Peter Bagge, and Robert Crumb, and well, there you go.
May 30, 2006
Doctor Who - The Idiot's Lantern
Written by Mark Gatiss
2006
A great period setting--the Queen's coronation, 1953--and a bit of retro technofear (new televisions as alien conduit) make this episode one of the better ones. The Doctor and Rose land in London to way too many TV aerials and a electronics dealer, Magpie, selling them off to families for a pittance. It's for the Coronation, but surely not everyone on the block needs one? Plus, black police cars are pulling up in front of residences and taking people away, bundling them into the back seat with blankets over their heads.
Turns out an alien force is using the televisions to reach out to the viewers and suck their faces off (a nice, frightening touch), leaving a blank zombie behind. One who's already had their mug wiped is the grandma of a young boy, son of a nationalist bully father and a dominated mother. The Doctor arrives just in time to sort out the alien's plan and to provide some needed family counseling.
Idiots Lantern moves quickly, but it doesn't stay in the memory. For every creepy moment (those blank faces give me the willies), there's a cheeseball one--the alien, in the form of a kindly female BBC announcer, screaming HUNGREEEE!!! FEEEEED MEEEEEE!!! when it was much neater when she remained kindly (and evil).
Best of the supporting bunch is Ron Cook as Magpie, who does the alien's bidding to keep his face. The more he realises the alien's true plan (maximum viewership during the coronation broadcast means the best time to suck all of Britain's faces off) the more torn and disgusted with himself he becomes.
But so many things make no sense. We see that Magpie has sold TV sets to everyone on the street. But surely the point of setting the story during the Coronation is that very few people owned a set and so block parties (like the one we see at the end) were centered around only one television. Less televisions, more concentrated viewers. The story indicates that Magpie is only selling televisions in this neighborhood, instead of all over Britain. So are there thousands of Magpie-like men over Britain? And why does the alien suck people's faces off before the big day? As a snack, perhaps? Like the Cybermen story last week, budget constraints limited the vision, but surely some of this could have been dealt with by some dialog. Why does this alien choose this one, small shopkeeper to do her bidding? I get the feeling that a lot of this was written out in rewrites.
Next week: Shrimp-headed monsters in space.
Shohei Imamura dead at 79
Two obits in a row--I better write some jollier entries. Imamura was one of the masters of the Japanese New Wave. I highly recommend "The Pornographers" and "Insect Women" from his classic early period.
Two-time Cannes winner Shohei Imamura dies at 79
May 26, 2006
Desmond Dekker, 1941-2006
Dead at age 64, from a heart attack. One of the greats! R.I.P.
May 25, 2006
Doctor Who - Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel
Writer: Tom McRae
2006
The first two-parter of the season "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel" brought back an old nemesis (one of the least interesting, in my book) and tried to rework some modern magic on them. I found the episodes only mildly successful, mostly because of its pretensions of scope and its inability to provide the visuals or ideas to match. Instead of following the mythology--cybermen, hailing from Telos, invading planets and such--the script posits an alternative universe where Cybermen are invention by a mad CEO of a telecommunications company. Played by wheezing, scene-chompiness by Roger Lloyd Pack, John Lumic desires to evolve and escape from his wheelchair-bound, terminally ill state. (Though I have to give Mr. Pack credit for saying he created the character based on Donald Rumsfeld.)
What we get is Mickey finding his grandma is still alive, finding his alt-reality self (called Rickey here), Rose finding her dad is still alive (replowing the emotional furrow of "Father's Day"), and being trapped in alt-earth while the Tardis recharges (and the Doctor saves the world).
A few days after watching the episode, not much sticks. The cybermen must have been so expensive to make that shots of them marching in formation aren't that impressive (sentries of half-a-dozen, marching, and not very fast, must be very easy to outrun). There is, however, a good bit where the Doctor and an underground revolutionary break into cybermen HQ and must traverse a narrow corridor filled with dormant cybermen. We just know they are going to wake up...but when? I'm sure some kiddies were frightened by it all.
But there was a lot of lazy writing and the parallel dimension wasn't thought out too well, just a few nips and tucks. The finale, where the Doctor manages to unlock a circuit that had been blocking what remained of the cybermans human host's emotions, should have played sad and chilling. It was at first silly (emotions equal pelvic writhing) and then ignored (why does a cyberman then chase the escaping humans up a rope ladder if it's now human? Why, to get a "last cyberman falling into an inferno" shot, of course.)
So, sort of a bummer. I guess it doesn't help that I'm having my mind altered by reading all these Philip K. Dick stories recently. Who just can't match up.
Next week: killer televisions!
May 22, 2006
The Day the Universe Changed, Manchester edition
Paul Morely writes in this Observer piece on the history of Manchester's music scene about the nights that changed music as we know it--the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, June 4 and July 20, 1976.
Devoto, let's just say, for the hell of it because the story has to start somewhere, with a bang, or a legendary punk gig, was the man who changed Manchester because he had an idea about what needed to happen at just the right time in just the right place. He arranged for the Sex Pistols to play in Manchester before the rest of the country had caught up with the idea that there was any such thing as a Sex Pistol. In the audience for the shows were Mark E Smith, Ian Curtis, Morrissey and Devoto himself, four of the greatest rock singers of all time, directly challenged to take things on. Johnny Rotten was like a psychotic lecturer explaining to these avant-garde music fans exactly what to do with their love for music, the things they wanted to say, and their unknown need to perform.A good, short history for the uninitiated, filling in Liverpool's punk history as well.
May 16, 2006
The Fall - Live at the Knitting Factory, LA 5/13/06
Photo by Brian Damage from this Flickr set.
[Warning: Geeky, obsessed fan review follows]
I've had few transcendent moments watching live music (many more on headphones and/or driving, thanks), but this weekend I had an damn near out of body experience at The Fall concert at the Knitting Factory. It helped that I haven't seen the group since 1993 and that the new album is just brilliant, and also that I was second from the front of the stage, dead center, and located right next a giant bass floor speaker that I'm sure has now rendered me sterile through low frequency vibrations. But it was worth it!
As late as Tuesday the band seemed to be in jeopardy. The three-man backing group (not counting Elena, Mark E. Smith's enigmatic, keyboard-playing wife) had been fired or quit, and the gig in Phoenix ended abruptly when the lead singer of one of the opening acts lobbed a banana peel at Mark E. Smith's head mid-song. There was a scuffle and a kerfuffle and it looked like it was going to be 1998 all over again, when the MES got in a fight on stage with the band and never made it to the West coast.
But no! In the space of 24 hours, MES had co-opted a friendlier opening act, made up of two guys from Darker My Love and one from a duo called On the Hill and suddenly these three Yanks were part of the 30+th incarnation of the Fall. And the reports (from San Diego and Pomona) came in that this band was hot shit. Ah yeh, I thought, I don't have to cancel my tickets.
So, here we (Jon and I) were at the Knitting Factory on Sunset Blvd. and suffering through two opening acts of various degrees of competence. Then the curtain closed and we waited. I ran into a fellow Fall fan from Santa Barbara and we got all excited in anticipation. The audience ran the gamut from just 21 to fathers bringing their sons for their first Fall concert (Father of the Year award to that man in the Bend Sinister T-shirt, thanks!). Also, guys, if your girlfriend turns out to love the Fall (and wigs out like the one I saw off to the right of me, all hair and flailing limbs), she's a keeper.
First an insufferable, yet hilariously anti-audience video DJ guy opened for the band, looping microseconds of pop videos into a Carl Stone-meets-Industrial-dance mess. I kinda felt sorry for the guy, the audience hated him by the end of his endless set. "You're not Stockhausen!" someone yelled.
Finally, the group walked on, and we got to see the new line-up: Tim Presley on guitar, Rob Barbato, a lumberjack hulk of a man on bass, and Orpheo McCord, a smashin' great drummer who had a wide smile on his face the entire concert. And why not? He's in the Fall!! And of course there's the enigmatic and beautiful Elena Poulou, who walks on with a giant polka dot bag and stands behind this teeny Korg synth for the entire concert. They pile into "Bo Demmick", with it's Bo Diddley drum riff, and off we go.
Mark E. Smith walks on. Can't believe the main is 48 or whatever, he looks 62. He removes his cheap jacket and us in the front notice there a hole in the seat of his trousers where a pocket button has been ripped off. Maybe he knows and doesn't care. I always get the feeling so much is intentional--such as annoying the audience with 30 minutes of video wank so the result is a big purging sensation when the band starts up.
"The CD you hold in your-ah HA-ANDS!" he rants. He's got two microphones. He's singing into both. One gets hopelessly tangled around the mic stand and he's pulling it around the stage. We're singing along to the chorus, which I believe is "HEY FATTIE! HEY FATTIE!!" According to the Unofficial Fall website forum, this song was messed up (couldn't tell), the following "Pacifying Joint" was a shambles (still, couldn't tell), and the Hunter S. Thompson tribute "Midnight Aspen" was out of tune (was it? No wonder I can't sing.)
But we all agreed, all 500+ people squeezed into the Knitting Factory, that Sparta FC rocked the freakin' house, starting off with the dive-bombing opening riff and all the vocal parts handled superbly by Elena and Rob (and me in the audience, yelling "HEY!" and "ENGLISH CHELSEA FAN! THIS IS YOUR LAST GAME!"). Mark brings the band up front, right close to the edge of the stage. I turn around to Jon to give him a "what about that, then, eh?" look and see he's stuck behind this pogoing dude, looking annoyed. Oh, well, back to the stage.
Next comes Mountain Energei, which is mysterious and cool on Country on the Click, and is dark and menacing here. Whee! Plus it goes on for aaaaages. Then "Wrong Place, Right Time" starts up and Orpheo belts out the rhythm, just loving it. It's all cowbell! It's '70s!! Rob's bass is hard and snappin'. "Holy Mother of God!!" I think. They end with the anthemic "What About Us," which has gone from one of the new album's best tracks to a part of the "canon", I believe. Its singalong (really, shoutalong) chorus is a pleasure every time it comes around, and boy does it come around. For eight minutes! Mark basically goes through the lyrics twice.
Encore! Encore! We get the joyous "I Can Hear the Grass Grow" and then, OMFG, a version of "Blindess" that brought me pretty close to the Face of God. I swear this version times in between 15 and 20 minutes, but I could be wrong. It's Krautrock meets Punk. It's an work of architecture that the band constructs, then Mark E. Smith rebuilds several times by live-mixing sound on stage (better known as futzing with everybody's amps). The guitar disappears, reappears. The bass drum mic is kicked aside, Rob nearly steps on it, looks down with a "what the hell?" look, places it back. Elena steps aside while Mark holds one or two keys down of the Korg. The mics are over the place, and still the RIFF THE RIFF it just keeps going, all menace. "I was on ONE LEHHHHHHHHG!" Mark cracks. "Blind Man! Have Mercy on Me!" Is this one of the best Fall songs ever? It's certainly up there with Big New Prinz. Then the mics are gone and Mark E. Smith just stands at the lip of the stage, yelling the lyrics, or communicating with apparitions, or something. He's gone somewhere else, he's standing on the house that the band has built out of THE RIFF. Hot damn!!
One more encore and it's 2 mins of Mr. Pharmacist, no more no less. Bang. And we're done.
Ladies and gentleman, that was the Fall. I find Jon, who's still annoyed about pogo-ing boy, and I turn to see a guy in wire specs and a full beard and we just yell enthusiasm at each other, all the pent up goodness of the gig needing an outlet. No idea who he was, but The Fall can do that to people.
May 12, 2006
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Vintage, 2003
Mark Haddon comes from a background of childrens books, which partly explains the simple, straightforward storytelling of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Yet the tone, and the clinical POV of its autistic protagonist allow for all sorts of adult ironies to make their way in. The novel starts off with a murder--of a next door neighbor's dog--but it is Christopher's desire to solve this parochial mystery that leads to the uncovering of secrets and real human pain--about his father's life, his mother's, and some of himself. Shades of Vonnegut-like distance and cartooning, but at heart a empathetic tale. Without the POV device, Haddon's tale would be a depressing story of a developmentally disabled teenager and kitchen sink melodrama. But as it is, its revelations are heartbreaking, because they are played so objectively.
May 10, 2006
Storyville
Dir. Mark Frost
1992
A steamy belch of bayou gas, Mark Frost's Storyville features senators behaving badly, lawyers acting erratically, and judges packing heat. A story this silly could only come out of the fevered dream of New Orleans, and Frost is working from a novel called Juryman by Frank Galbally and Robert Macklin. I assume he was faithful, because I can't find anything about the book on the web.
James Spader plays Cray Fowler, who is running for Democratic Senator and backed by a successful family of oilmen. He's a young vision of Clinton (the film is circa 1992), and similarly can't resist following his knob, which soon leads him into the dojo and hot tub of a Vietnamese hottie, Lee (Charlotte Lewis). What a hot tub is doing in a dojo, I don't know. What Vietnamese have to do with dojos and Japanese architecture in general I also don't know. And why o why during election season, Cray can't see that he is being set up is beyond me. Soon, there's a videotape, blackmail, a dead Vietnamese father, and Cray narrowly escapes being fingered for the crime.
If you've followed the film so far, wait. Cray, still a lawyer, decides to defend Lee against the charges that she killed her father, while he also investigates his own father's decades-old "suicide". This is what is called a "ballsy gambit."
Utterly fantastical and nonsensical, Storyville at least succeeds in pulling us along a path where even Grisham would fear to tread. Despite his errors, Cray does what's right for his constituents and rights old wrongs. How he does so is beyond reason, but he does them nonetheless. My friend Chris loooooves this film, and I think he has some s'plainin' to do...
PS: Charlotte Lewis is actually a mix of Irish-Iraqi-Chilean. None of these countries have martial arts...
May 09, 2006
K-Punk tackles Mark E. Smith
I've enjoyed K-Punk's Lacanian takes on Cronenberg, Lynch, and Doctor Who, among others. This week, he starts a two part series examining The Fall, primarily the early albums. It's good stuff, as usual:
On ‘Specter versus Rector’, any vestigial rock presence subsides into hauntology. The original track is nothing of the sort – it is already a palimpsest, spooked by itself; at least two versions are playing, out of sync. The track – and it is very definitely a track, not a ‘song’ - foregrounds both its own textuality and its texturality. It begins with cassette hum and when the sleeve notes tell us that it was partly 'recorded in a damp warehouse in MC/R' we are far from surprised. Steve Hanley’s bass rumbles and thumps like some implacable earth-moving machine invented by a deranged undergound race, not so much rising from subterranea as dragging the sound down into a troglodytic goblin kingdom in which ordinary sonic values are inverted. From now on, and for all the records that really matter, Hanley’s bass will be the lead instrument, the monstrous foundations on which the Fall's upside-down sound will be built. Like Joy Division, fellow modernists from Manchester, The Fall scramble the grammar of white rock by privileging rhythm over melody.And just in time for the M.R. James anthology I ordered to come in the mail...
Best of Youth
Dir. Marco Tullio Giordana
2003
Spanning four decades in the life of one Italian family, Best of Youth recreates the depth and psychological breadth of a fine novel. It's also compulsive viewing, though I spread its six-hour length over a few days. And to talk about what happens in the film would ruin your potential enjoyment of its character development and plot twists (which are often sudden and shocking).
But essentially we have two brothers, Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni), who we join as they are about to graduate from college in the early 60s. Along with two of their friends, they have a great European trip planned. Nicola is the studious one, Matteo is the impulsive one, though even at the beginning, they share each others qualities. The trip goes awry--Matteo, who is volunteering at a psychiatric hospital, rescues a young female patient,Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), convinced she is being tortured with electroshock therapy. The two friends go on ahead, while the two brothers abscond with the girl to return her to her family in the north. Yet, that doesn't work out either, in surprising ways, and Nicola winds up being the only one to really travel outside the country, up to Norway.
In this opening hour, director Marco Tullio Giordana and writers Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli are planting the psychological seeds of all that will happen later with the two brothers, underlying most of their decisions and choices. Nicola's brief fling with a Norwegian may be what attracts him to the blonde, Nico-like Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco)--also her unruliness may suggest a substitution for the (now distant) brother. And a lot of what happens to Matteo results from his unrequited love for Giorgia.
Yet, there's so much more, and Best of Youth is one of those films that you can debate with friends, because the film gives so much information. Giordana swings no hammers to make sure we get these connections, but goes with a softer touch. Both male and female characters are complex and deep, and by the end, we feel we know them very well.
(My only complaint was a middle section full of some of the worse process shots--greenscreen in a car--that I've seen. Absolutely baffling that in a film this gorgeously shot one would find this effects work that makes local cable look pro).
Anyway, highly highly highly recommended. Life-changing, like the similarly long Human Condition by Masaki Kobayashi.
May 08, 2006
Doctor Who - The Girl in the Fireplace
Written by Stephen Moffat
2006
At last. Finally. An episode of Doctor Who that can stand up with the best from Season One. The Girl in the Fireplace looked like it was going to be a typical "run away from mechanical monsters" story in the preview, but Stephen Moffat's script managed to be a thoughtful piece about time and love.
The Doctor and companions land on a 51st century spaceship that contain time portals into 18th century France. Why and how are discovered over the course of the episode, but at the center is, Reinette, a young girl who will grow up to become Madame de Pompadour, mistress to the king. She also believes, when the Doctor enters her room via the fireplace that he is her imaginary friend come to rescue her from the monster under the bed, a V-for-Vendetta style clockwork robot, all that's left of the ship's crew.
The Doctor's trips back and forth between the ship and France are only minutes, but each window is another stage in Reinette's life. Like Sarah Jane Smith last week, the madam waits for the Doctor to return to save her from the moment when the robots return at age 37 to claim her head.
Now, there are lots of unexplained facts and plain plotholes in this episode (why do the robots have to watch her evolve? Why can't they just skip ahead to age 37? Why can't Reinette just leave the palace and get out of danger? Why is there a white horse wandering the spaceship?) but in this dreamy episode all this is secondary to the love that builds between the Doctor and the rapidly aging mistress (again, reflecting what was said last week to SJS about watching companions age). She has spent her life waiting for these brief moments of pleasure, while the Doctor must choose between traveling through time or resigning himself to a temporal existence (much like a Greek Gods desire to become mortal) for love. We know what the end result will be, yet Moffat manages to wring as much pathos and sadness out of the Doctor's decision (and his equally rash return to the spaceship).
Rose and Mickey are essentially marginalized for the majority of the episode, which is a weakness. Some stories really only belong to the Doctor. But the irritating breakneck pace of the earlier episodes is gone and the same amount of time delivers the kind of bittersweet emotion that School Reunion should have had.
Next week: Cybermen!
May 06, 2006
Jim Woodring Has a Blog
May 03, 2006
Marebito
Dir. Takashi Shimizu
2004
Made in conjunction with one of Tokyo's film school's and starring Shinya Tsukamoto, better known as a film director of Tetsuo: Iron Man, Marebito successfully marries Japanese grunginess with a particular brand of early 20th century Lovecraftian horror. It's a relief to see that this was shot by the same director of (and at the same time as) the U.S. remake of The Grudge, and that Hollywood hasn't gone to his head. Instead, this is a creepy, shot-on-several-kinds-of-video story.
Masuoka (Tsukamoto) is a freelance cameraman who captures a particularly gruesome suicide on camera. The victim's last moments suggest a man overcome by fear. For Masuoka, who likes to hide behind his camera, he is attracted to being able to witness such terror in the flesh. Would it drive him mad, too? Of course, this is a question none of us may have ever encountered, but it sounds very familiar if you've read any Lovecraft, the "heroes" of such are always fulfilling a type of deathwish. The film even has a purplish voice-over--very H.P., that. Chiaki Konaka wrote the script based on his novel--Konaka wrote, among others, the anime Serial Experiments: Lain and Texhnolyze, which follow the same kind of mood.
So Masuoka descends into the tunnels under the Tokyo Subway and continues to go further and further down into the earth. This sequence is quite magical, with Masuoka meeting the suicide victim's ghost, entering the "Mountains of Madness" (with a further name check to Richard Sharpe Shaver, who wrote about the hollow earth and the "Dero," "Detrimental Robots" that torment those on the surface). He finds a young girl (Tomomi Miyashita), chained and naked, and returns with her to the surface.
But the glassy eyed girl has an appetite for blood, and soon Masuoka begins to indulge her. The second half may lose the solipsistic dementia of the first, but it still maintains that despairing mood particular to (some) Japanese horror, full of cramped, befouled apartment, alienating city life, a total absence of any moral code.
With the girl in his possession, mysterious strangers begin to follow Masuoka. One is a heavyset man with a deep voice who comes from the underworld. The other is a woman claiming that the girl is actually their daughter. Marebito offers levels of reality, but as we are stuck inside the man's head, no one way is chosen. The ending is as ambiguous as it is unnerving.
By the way, Chiaki Konaka has a website.
Theater Review: Lola Goes to Roma
'Lola' offers a world tour of clichès
May 3, 2006 8:19 AM
Yet another frustrated movie script masquerading as a play, Josefina Lopez's "Lola Goes to Roma" follows in bitty and piecemeal fashion the travels of a Los Angeles-based mother and daughter in Europe. Apart from a colorful set and glamorous parade of costume design, the play has little to recommend it -- full of anti-intellectualism, tired clichès of European nations and perfunctory writing.
The play tells us little about life lived, but more about the amount of European-set Hollywood films watched, stitched together as it is from remnants of "Roman Holiday," "Three Coins in the Fountain," "Shirley Valentine," and a whole slew of Yanks abroad romantic comedies.
But this is 2006, and Ms. Lopez's play is virtually brand new, with one previous show at her own Casa 101 Theater in Boyle Heights. SBCC's friendship with the playwright started with its production last term of "Real Women Have Curves," which, though formulaic, at least tackled in a humorous way issues of immigration and body image.
There's little depth, however, in the main character of Roma (Dekyi Ronge), a young graduate student who has just received her doctorate and plans to spend the next several weeks on a European vacation. However, she returns home to find her father dead from cancer, and her mother, Lola (Marina Gonzalez Palmier) is mourning.
Or is she? This was the end of a long illness, and of a marriage long since drained of love. Lola is ready to party, it turns out, and after a ham-handed scene where Roma's other siblings conspire to get her out of the house, Lola and Roma are off.
This is predictable, country-jumping travelogue, with a vivacious and sex-hungry older woman and a frumpy, repressed younger one. Roma's repression stems from being too educated, it appears, an odd message for a college production to be promoting, and a step backward from the "Real Women" portrayal of a struggling student. Nothing appears later to challenge this stereotype, only to reinforce it.
When Roma claims that no man will have her because she's too smart, her mother's remedy is that most cornball of chick-flick salves: the salon makeover.
To the pounding strains of Chaka Khan's "I'm Every Woman," Roma lets her hair down, gets her nails done, and puts on a slinky red dress, and soon enough picks up a man. The teeth-grinding simplemindedness of it all is enough to put feminism back 10 years. Yet this is the culmination of Roma's character arc.
Not that Lola's progression is much of one either. Lola once had a lover when she herself studied abroad in Rome back in the day (cue beatnik bongo players and Vespa drivers), a summer love that led to a tearful departure and a secret love child.
Priscilla Oliveira and Chris Johnston play the couple in flashback, and the whole episode is so hastily written and melodramatic that the end result is bathos. The same goes for the present-day reconciliation, a wordless scene that relies on pop music to provide the emotion without working for it with, say, dialogue and acting.
Ms. Lopez has her eye on Hollywood with "Lola Goes to Roma," and indeed the program reminds us that the film version is scheduled for production this fall. In this, Ms. Lopez has succeeded well, as the play demonstrates the symptoms of the worst tinseltown product: cheap emotion, a conservative fear of intelligence and a post-modern divorce from lived experience.
Director Katie Laris manages to keep the action bustling on stage, and in collaboration with choreographer Carrie Diamond, offers up a few dance numbers which, though they never advance the plot, are at least pretty to look at. The costumes by Ann Bruice are in the service of stereotypes -- mimes in striped shirts and berets(!) -- but are nevertheless colorful and sometimes adorable. Ms. Bruice's salsa club dancers sway and dip in flowing silks and polyester.
The set design by Theodore Michael Dolas allows for a morphing of the Jurkowitz Theater stage into a nightclub or a hotel room by a series of hidden beds and tables, while the walls are an abstract collection of travel stickers. Less successful is the use of an ever-present projection screen, which irritates, distracts, and spoon-feeds locations to the audience. A similar screen was used in Ms. Laris' previous production (''Gunfighter") to similar effect.
Plays like "Lola Goes to Roma" try to beat Hollywood at its own game, while forgetting what theater can offer what television and movies can't: a chance to connect live actors and audience, an opportunity to develop character and discover emotion in real time. "Lola" is too busy rushing around to ever come to this conclusion.
May 02, 2006
Time Out of Joint - Philip K. Dick
Penguin Books
1959 (1979 reprint)
My friend Jeff literally gasped when I told him I was reading Philip K. Dick for the first time. He of course has been a fan for years, and quickly rattled off a list of must-reads in his bibliography, including a biography which will give some context.
Dick novels are hard to find used here--the Public Library has a few, and the Book Den has at most one at any time. This is not a reason for me not reading earlier, just a fact. There's something groovy, then, in picking up this Penguin UK paperback, a thin novel--it feels like a coffee break.
Time Out of Joint is an early work, and tells the story of Rangle Gumm, a 40-something layabout who starts to suspect that his small-town suburban reality is not what it all seems. Objects disappear in front of him, leaving only the object's name on a scrap of paper. His young cousin finds old magazines and phonebooks that don't correspond to the era. The cousin also builds a crystal radio and Ragle begins to hear pilots passing overhead, talking about him. And why does he keep winning his local paper's mail-in quiz?
The publication date was 1959, and not only is Dick presaging all sorts of recent alt.reality movies like the Matrix and Truman Show, but part of what I liked about this novel is his depictions of life in late-50's America. He understands the phony veneer of post-war suburbia around the same time Twilight Zone was doing the same. The early chapters are now a glimpse into how people thought and acted back then, just before Dick bends their reality. He gets the consumerism that we are still suffering from, the "reality" that America creates around itself to keep out the messy Real. Baudrillard would have a field day with the book; so would Zizek. I breezed through, and got a kick in the pants--fun stuff.
For a much more intelligent consideration of the novel, for those who have read it, check out The Four Levels of Reality in Time Out of Joint by Yves Potin.
All Your Childhood Base Belong to Us
Us, being, the denizens of the Internet, and one particular blog called Scarstuff. They've dug up and posted the MAD Magazine
Super Spectacular Day flexisingle that I owned back in 1980. The single was particularly interesting for having eight different endings, all randomly determined from where the stylus landed. This meant that as you tried to listen to all eight endings, the song got stuck in your head. I'm almost scared to relisten to it-- I still have that obnoxious "UNTILLLL!!" knocking about my brain all these years later.
May 01, 2006
Doctor Who - School Reunion
Written by Toby Whitehouse
2006
Ironically, on the weekend the Beeb broadcast this latest Doctor Who episode, America's Sci-Fi channel was finally getting around to showing "Father's Day," one of the best episodes of the first season, and one of the best--dare I say--of all Doctor Who. Ironic in that I so wanted "School Reunion" to at least aim for the emotion of that episode, knowing that it would be bringing back former assistant Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen), and well, it comes up short.
The plot was straight out of Rodriguez' "The Faculty," with a school overrun by aliens in teachers' clothing. There's some mysterious oil, a supercomputer, large bat creatures, and a headmaster who is cartoony evil. For 45 minutes, it still feels rushed, leaving out the usual Tardis-landing, where-are-we introduction. Instead, The Doctor and Rose are already in place, working undercover in the school as a teacher and a school lunch lady respectively. Then Sarah Jane Smith turns up as an investigative reporter and the episode heads towards its emotional core.
"I waited for you, all these years!" Sarah says to the Doctor, and fans will remember how she was dropped back off on Earth, suddenly after the Doctor was called to Gallifrey alone. Trouble is, every time the story turned dramatic (ie. interesting), some silliness intervened, including being attacked by giant bats and such. Rose's kneejerk jealousy was a bit too obvious, especially after her character's development last season, which suggested that her mind had expanded beyond her time-and-space-bound earth perspective. The same goes for the little bitch-fight the two assistants have later. ("I saw a werewolf!" "Well, I saw the Loch Ness Monster!" etc.) It was cute, but designed purely for fans. Much better was the Doctor having to defend why he changes assistants over the years--it was suddenly brutal and harsh and Rose was taken aback.
Maybe it's too much of me to ask for more drama in a sci-fi serial, but go back and rewatch "Father's Day" and be amazed at how much emotion (and time-paradox goodness) is packed into a simple siege scenario.
The last five minutes, though, nearly made up for it, with a final goodbye insisted on from Sarah, and K-9 returned to its mistress. Silly tin dog.
Surely this story deserved a two-part arc?
Speaking Truthiness to Power
Stephen Colbert is not just a brilliant comedian, but one of the bravest people this year (in media, you know) after his electrifying speech in front of the National Press Club last weekend. If you haven't seen the video, this tribute page has been set up to guide you to the links. With our fascist "leader" only a few chairs away, Colbert flayed the administration and its lapdog press in his parody Right Winger persona. It was just great, and I won't ruin any of the jokes by printing them here, as they'll lose their effect. Why does it take a comedian to do the press' job, eh?
UPDATE: Graphic found (and presumably created by the fellow) here.