Of the Future

Witness The Apple Store of the Future.

(This, via You Can't Make It Up, your new favorite blog. And by "your" I mean "my." Guffaw, snicker, and swoon.)

Joanna Newsom

The thing that both her fans and her detractors consistently neglect to mention in the whole debate about her voice is that Joanna Newsom actually has really incredible pitch. I haven't listened to The Milk-Eyed Mender all the way through yet, but, considering the freak-folk aesthetic doesn't turn me on in the slightest, I was surprised by how much I was digging it. Which I probably wouldn't have had the descriptions of her vocal stylings (check out #12 in this link) been accurate in their hyperbole of annoyance. I was expecting not just screeching, but tuneless screeching, a kind of Florence Foster Jenkins / outsider music / so-bad-it's-gone-past-good-and-back-around-to-bad-again thing. But . . . she really just kind of sounds like the bastard love child of Bjork and Colin Meloy, between the chewy, childlike diction and those belted notes right on the threshold of the chest voice/head voice break. But, her intonation is laser-sharp, which makes up for a multitude of vocal-quality sins. Like I said, I haven't listened to the album in its entirety yet, so I can't speak to the quality of the lyrics or the cumulative effect of all the songs taken together as an artistic statement, but I'm here to tell you that it's completely safe to venture into the milky waters!

Movies That Begin with "C"?

Is there any discernible reason why the poster for the new Keanu Reeves vehicle Constantine should look so inspired by the old classic Chinatown poster?

I see the Constantine poster on the side of the bus shelter at Chicago and Dearborn every time I'm walking east toward Michigan Avenue, and it buuugs me. You know what also bugs me? Rachel Weisz's American accent in the preview. "I neeeed to seeee whaht you seeee." **eye roll**

Allie McFee's Internet Tendency

Mike O'D recently sent a list proposal to the good folks at McSweeney's and the fuckers summarily rejected it. I love me some McSwy's, but I can't say I'm not disappointed in their lack of comedic perspicacity here. I mean, there's no way this is less funny than some of their recent stuff. Ah well. Sometimes the rejection is its own compliment.

L E S S  S C A R Y  N A M E S
  
F O R  V A R I O U S  D I N O S A U R S
  
A N D  P R E H I S T O R I C  A N I M A L S.

BY MICHAEL O'DONNELL
----

1. Velocirabbit
2. Tyrannosaurus Puny Shanks
3. Emily Brontësaurus
4. Wookie Mammoth
5. Stegosardine
6. Diplodocous cous
7. Tricera-Plain and Tall
8. Knap-sackiosaurus
9. Saber-Toothed Gerbil
10. Pteradon Cheadle

Colin Meloy

In the spirit of the Decemberists' vast and polysyllabic vocabulary, I'm struggling to come up with a word for what Colin Meloy is. The whole time we were at his solo show at Schubas last night, I was looking for a word that could encompass his sweet stage presence, his frighteningly nimble command of the English language, his little boy/dime-store adventure novel trashy narrative sensibility, his silliness, his generosity, his somewhat English major-y self-conscious gravity, and his (oh yeah) bad-ass guitar chops.

(Sidenote: brutha can play. In my tendency to fixate on the mind-blowing perfection of lyrics like "I know every yardarm/from main mast to jib sheet/ but sometimes I long to be landlocked/and work in a bakery" or "until at last she's satisfied the lot of the marina's teeming minions, in their opinion" or, hell, the entirety of "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect," I often overlook just what an accomplished musician he clearly is. He nailed that hypnotic repeating pattern from "The Gymnast, High Above the Ground" without batting an eyelash and played the entirety of "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade," solo, without sacrificing any of the languid dreaminess of the first part, the pensive swooniness of the middle bit, or the intricate, driving intensity that charges headlong into "we're calling all bed wetters. . . !" And, I don't know much of anything about guitar tech stuff, but, as BAK pointed out, agog, last eve, I don't think there was a bigger thing in the room than the sound he got out of his 12-string.)

So, if anyone has any suggestions on what this word might be, please let me know.

Also, you can all now envy me, since I am the proud owner of one of the limited edition "Colin Meloy sings Morrissey" EPs. Geek-factor aside, it's worth it for Carson Ellis's sleeve art alone.

T.G.S.

And there was much rejoicing in the land, for a new Teen Girl Squad was revealed unto them.

"Can I not get stuck playing bass?" "NO WAY!!!"

Anti-Bullying

Fuck the whole rubber bracelet phenomenon in general (especially the grandaddy of 'em all, the "I'm So Sorry About Your Nut, Lance" yellow ones), but this seems exceptionally silly. This blog entry nails the absurdity of it all. Enjoy.

Globs

Sorry, media sluts; don't come crying to me looking for a Golden Globes recap. I didn't even realize the damn thing was on last night.

I did, however, finally get a chance to see Million Dollar Baby yesterday, and it's just as fab as everyone says it is. I wept like a small child, especially during the scene in the car when they're driving back after visiting with her mother. I vastly prefer this one to Mystic River.

Listened to Regeneration on my way in to work today. There was something about the combination of the sunshine and the bone-chilling cold that just made it seem like the right musical choice for the morning. It holds up beautifully. As enamored as I am of the DC's big fat orchestral stuff, I often forget what a solid, indie-rock effort this album is. Nigel Godrich's fingerprints are all over it (do you think he carries a glockenspiel around with him at all times, just in case?), and the emotional intimacy in both Neil's lyrics and his vocals is all the more startling and affecting the way it contrasts with the allusions and more archly witty word play that you find in the rest of his catalog. And "The Beauty Regime" is still one of the best album-closers ever.

Closer (Part II, Kinda)

As the members of my loyal readership may or may not remember, I wasn't overly fond of the movie version of Closer, but expressed a strong desire to read the original stage play in order to engage in a little compare/contrast action. Well, mad props (as the kids say) are due to Lisa Ro for loaning me her copy of the script about a week ago. Reading it was extraordinarily enlightening.

In a brief and highly spotty survey I made of my cinema-going acquaintances, I found that, of those who saw the film, I'm one of the only ones who actively disliked it. Which surprised even me, since, as I've stated elsewhere, I generally tend to like these kinds of really dark relationship chamber pieces. But, after having read the play, I'm slowly starting to think that what people are responding to in the movie isn't so much the movie, per se, as it is the vestiges of Marber's original thematic intent that didn't get lost in the translation. There is an undeniable, magnetic truth in this story of four people bashing into each other's lives with violence and passion and longing and misplaced expectations, which will always be there, no matter how miscast or otherwise bungled the film turned out to be.

And yet.

Leave it to a big, fucking, glossy-ass Hollywood movie (in the most pejorative sense of the word) to turn what is, all things considered, a sophisticated and archly British exploration of the influence of class and death on intimate relationships into a naughty little peek into the softcore sexual improprieties of whiny pin-ups and the constipated lunks who wish to bed them. Christ! Could Nichols have sucked any more of the play's strengths out of the movie in an effort to turn it into Carnal Knowledge, Redux?

(I hereby declare that I completely exonerate Marber himself from all culpability in the whole cinematic debacle, though, to be fair he did receive sole credit for writing the screenplay, and, in an issue of Entertainment Weekly that I must have thrown away recently, claims to be totally happy with his revamped ending. But, Hollywood is Hollywood, and screenwriters are screenwriters--regardless of their pedigrees--so I don't suppose that his opinions, his theories, or even his words were given much weight in the end.)

The number-one thing missing from the film is any attempt to contextualize the characters, their hang-ups, their attitudes, their actions, and their reactions in relation to their respective experiences of death. Sure, we get the one scene in Postman's Park where Jude Law mentions his mother's passing, and, yes, he is still employed as an obituary writer, but those minor details don't in any way inform the tenor of the film as a whole. Whereas, in the play, we don't just get those bits of information, but an avalanche of additional references to death--we get Alice fibbing to Larry about her parents dying in a car crash (though the audience doesn't necessarily know that it's a lie), Dan's father finally dying after a long stint in a nursing home, all that business about smoking or not smoking cigarettes (Larry says to Alice during Anna's photography exhibition in Act I, Scene 5, "Pleasure and self-destruction, the perfect poison"), Dan begging Anna in that same scene, "Don't marry him, marry me. Grow old with me . . . die with me," Larry sneering at Dan during their confrontation in his office in Act II, Scene 10, "She [Anna] tells me you wake in the night, crying for your dead mother. You mummy's boy," and, of course, the tragic revelation in the final scene that Alice herself has died. With all this death and dread seeping in around the edges of the play, it's not hard to read all the fucking and crying and other messy behavior as an attempt to beat back the grave. And, to read the title as not just a description of the sordid emotional entanglements these people find themselves in or the literal amount of space between bodies in a moment of physical intimacy (sex, darlings, I mean sex), but also as a measurement of the distance between the present moment and your inevitable last breath.

You got your Eros, you got your Thanatos, what else do you want? OK, you want class issues, you got 'em.

So, in addition to losing a gi-normous fucking range of emotional and dramatic expressiveness by casting Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts in the two female roles, you also lose any opportunity there might have been to allude to the clash of classes that would have been possible with an all-English quartet. In the version of the script I was reading, I got more poetry on this subject in the goddamn front matter and prefatory stage directions than I did over the course of the entire movie. The character listing reads, with diamond-like precision: "Alice, a girl from the town. Dan, a man from the suburbs. Larry, a man from the city. Anna, a woman from the country." I mean, wow, already, right there, you get a whole wash of color that describes the way these people aren't going to be speaking quite the same language, no matter how badly they want to connect with each other. But, when you drag the actresses' Americanness into the picture, there's too much extraneous (and more obvious) static introduced into the interpersonal dynamic to get a good read on the subtleties of social stratification (there's the broader cross-cultural clash to be considered, in addition to a more prominent "men versus women" antagonism--when, in Act I, Scene 2 of the play, Dan asks Anna why she's getting "sisterly" about Alice, the line in the movie is changed to something like, "what is this, patriotism?").

Though amusing on its own terms, in the movie, the scene between Larry and Anna where he criticizes the decor in their bathroom ("It's got attitude. The mirror says, 'Who the fuck are you?'") doesn't have any kind of gut-wrenching heft nor does it mean much of anything at all, really. When she asks him, "Are you experiencing bourgeois guilt?" and he counters "Working-class guilt," it sounds like the most pointless conversation a doctor could possibly have with Julia Roberts. However, in a more explicitly British context, with greater sensitivity to the varieties of regional accents and such, Larry, throughout the piece, comes off as a lower-class bloke who's done well for himself professionally, but will always be considered somewhat--what's the word they're using for it these days?--"chav". (Dan asks Anna at the gallery, "Talk to Doctor Larry about photography, do you? Is he a fan of Man Ray or Karsh? He'll bore you." Later, in Act II, Scene 8, when she tells him that Larry has a new private practice, Dan sallies, "How does he square that with his politics?" And there's of course Larry's recollection that he used to frequent Alice's strip joint twenty years ago when it used to be a punk club.) And, shall we tip-toe out on some sort of ledge here, and fish around for the symbolic meaning of the title in the way it relates to the characters trying to get "closer" to their own personal ideas of what The Good Life is?

At any rate, for me, it's only when all this other juicy stuff gets folded into the mix that the bile and the vulgar language and the sexual treachery start to cut as deeply as I'd like to believe Marber meant it to. Of course, Nichols thought he could just give us the dessert (Portman's tits, Roberts saying "fuck" a lot, Law's seductiveness, Owen's smoldering), without putting anything more substantial into the pot. Which, rather than achieving the effect of mainlining the distilled essence of every cruel moment from every failed relationship you've ever been in, just feels like a lightweight, formless, petulant attempt to turn you on with plastic masochism.

I'm throwing down the gauntlet. Someone in Chicago (Remy Bumppo, are you listening?) needs to stage a production of this play, right now. Think about it--it's a win/win situation. I don't know how much the Dramatists Play Service would charge for royalties at this point, but the "free" publicity garnered from the name-recognition of the movie alone almost seems to guarantee that butts would be in the seats every night of the duration of the run. So, financially, you're set, and then you also get a chance to redeem this fantastic material and present it in a more authentic light.

DAN: You think love is simple? You think the heart is like a diagram?
LARRY: Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood. GO FUCK YOURSELF . . . you . . . WRITER. You LIAR.

Bernardo

Bill Murray, in a recent issue of Time, on wishy-washy would-be collaborators:

"I've had people say, 'I need you in this movie. You're the only one who can do it.' . . . And as soon as you say no, they've moved on to George Chakiris."

Welcome to the Flip Side

Welcome to the flip side, kibbles and bits! Oh, how it gives me such joy to see "2005" in the time stamp! If you're anything like me, you're breathing easier already.

On that note, a new year's haiku:

A lead smock taken
off your shoulders, post-X ray,
is how oh-five feels.

Right then. So, I don't know if it's a function of my standards getting too high or too low, but, of the handful of movies I saw during my holiday break, none of them really blew me away. But, I was able to take away with me more moments of discrete beauty and isolated pleasure than perhaps I would have expected, given how lackluster the flicks left me feeling on the whole. (Which, incidentally, reminds me of a great Tarantino quote that comes from the complete online transcript of his interview in the April 16, 2004, issue of Entertainment Weekly. He says, "A movie doesn't have to do everything. A movie just has to do a couple of things. If it does those well and gives you a cool experience, a cool night at the movies, an emotion, that's good enough, man. But movies that get it all right are few and far between. It got to a point in the '80s when you didn't even hold a bad ending against a movie, because every movie had a cop-out ending. If you were going to hold bad endings against movies you'd never have liked anything.")

A quick rundown:

* Almodovar's Bad Education has me convinced that there is perhaps no actor, of any nationality or gender, working today that is more gorgeous than Gael Garcia Bernal. (Eat that, Orlando Bloom. How you like me now, Natalie Portman?) The tacky (and obvious) response to my "discrete moments of isolated pleasure" thing is to gush about the first time you see him on screen in drag. We're talking equal opportunity objectification here, people! Unfortunately, the character he plays in the movie is supposed to be a bad actor, so he (Bernal, not the character), I believe, intentionally overplays the tranny femininity in a mincing and decidedly unsexy way to serve the film as a whole. A selfless and artistically valid move, but one that is ultimately squandered considering the flick is pretty hollow for all its formal fireworks and potentially incendiary subject matter. But, then again, I don't like Almodovar all that much to begin with.

However, the one moment that has really stuck with me, emotionally, is when, during the shooting of the film-within-the-film, the director cuts the take, and we see Bernal's actor character openly weeping as techies dismantle the sets and other members of the film crew bustle around him. We learn later a possible reason why the character might have been upset after performing that specific scene, but that layer only adds to the stand-alone beauty of the image. For all of Almodovar's love of movies and intertextual references and whatnot, it seems like the one most breathlessly honest comment on a life lived inside cinema he's put into his whole recent oeuvre.

* I'll withhold judgment on The Life Aquatic until I have a chance to see it again (and again and again), but, yeah, y'know, it's not Rushmore. It's not Tenenbaums. But, so what? It's funny, it's lovely to look at, it's dark and touching, and even a weak Anderson offering is going to kick the living crap out of most of the other first-run stuff on the market at any given moment. So, all things considered, I'm content. Willem Dafoe is unspeakably hilarious, Jeff Goldblum is always going to be one of the most interesting things to watch in any movie he appears in, and Bill Murray's interp on "I'm getting sick of those goddamn dolphins" is pure gold.

* While my former esteem for Steven Soderbergh has been steadily going down the tubes ever since he won his Oscar, Ocean's 12 really isn't as bad as most of the heinous reviews have made it out to be. It's a trifle, but, unfortunately, not in the complimentary way that it was to call Ocean's 11 a trifle. It's very self-satisfied and very Hollywood in-jokey, two qualities that make me want to vomit inside my mouth a little, but any movie that has the good sense to cast both Eddie Izzard and Vincent Cassel is basically OK in my book. Cassel, with his triangular face and mop of curly hair and lithe frame and dangerously sly French attitude is, as always, here a fascinating creature to watch. He more than redeems what very little of actual, human interest he's given to do in the film.

* Yes, A Very Long Engagement is a maudlin mess (this, coming from a girl who loooves Amelie), and, yes, if you're in the mood (such as it is) for WWI, you should just rent Paths of Glory instead, but any chance a person gets to see Dominique Pinon do anything on screen should most definitely be taken. (Is my Francophilia oozing through loud and clear yet?) Hidden behind a shrub of a beard and playing your standard sympathetic uncle/father-figure, he doesn't get much chance to rock the physical comedy that would give Bill Irwin a run for his money (if anybody in the States bothered to notice). But just watch the subtlety of his timing in his banter with the mailman, watch the way he dials down his wildly magnetic natural charisma, refusing to upstage Mlle. Tautou during her scenes of golden emoting.

* Though many of the charms of the Lemony Snicket books (the fetishization of reading and researching and the process of trial-and-error; the helpless, sickening feeling of being almost willfully misunderstood by people in positions of power and authority over you; the tightrope walk the narrative manages in keeping the true tragedy of the orphan situation in balance with the broad comedy and snarky meta-commentary on why we read "unpleasant" stories at all) are flattened by the movie's insistence on chugging from plot point to plot point, the flick is still most certainly worth a look for Jim Carrey's performance. Even though it's been given away time and again in the previews, continually referring to baby Sunny as a monkey? Hilarious. And when Meryl Streep's grammar-loving Aunt Josephine tells him, "you certainly can turn a phrase" and he responds, "I can slap it up and rub it down, too," I very nearly fell out of my chair. (Fans of both the book and the movie should be as amused as I was to find that Count Olaf actually has his own website online. His blog had me cackling aloud.)