Thursday, July 27, 2006

P.S., Tell Owen to Bring His Bongos

"Sparrow Aviation Administration Blames Collision On Failure To Detect Pane Of Glass." I can't think of any better way to bring out the undercurrent of redonkulousness inherent to the months I spent getting up before dawn last fall to monitor with the CBCM than with this article from The Onion (via). Classic. The graphics are outstanding.

That's Dyer pride, bitches. Get shot at, shrug it off, continue on your drive to Michigan. Hometown, represent!

Steely Dan's "Peg" has to be one of the most perfect songs I can think of, so I was pleased as punch when Stereogum pointed me in the direction of this short making-of video. Minute after minute of brilliance, from Rick Marotta discussing how he got that spine-tinglingly perfect cymbal sound to Becker and Fagen openly sneering at guitar solo outtakes. Also, be sure to head over to Steely's web headquarters and read their bloody brilliantly funny open letter (also via the 'Gum) to Luke Wilson, asking him to convince Owen to publicly apologize at one of their concerts for stealing the plot idea for You, Me, and Dupree (serial comma, bitches) from their song "Cousin Dupree." If you don't immediately start giggling at the opening (all caps) salvo, "OPEN LETTER TO THE GREAT COMIC ACTOR, LUKE WILSON," you might be a little bit dead inside.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Wolverine vs. Shark

What's that you say? You haven't had enough Hugh Jackman in your life lately? Well, check the previews for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (via) and Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (via). Now I know why I'd been getting those films confused every time I read about them for the past year or so. I hate, hate, hated Requiem for a Dream, but thought Pi was kind of nifty, and, though I haven't seen it in years, I'm still fairly confident that Nolan's Insomnia is not just criminally underrated and under-seen but also much better than Memento. I'll be eager to see what these young turks have got up their sleeves this time around. The IMDB says we're looking at October release dates for both.

Also, this is going haunt my nightmares for weeks to come:

Thursday, July 20, 2006

One, Two. One, Two, Three, Four!

OMG, boner alert: Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman are doing a movie together. And not just any movie, but a bona-fee-day high-class period pitcha for the Beeb, based on CRP go-to foreword-writer Philippa Gregory's novel The Other Boleyn Girl. Natalie will play Anne, and Scarlett will play her sister Mary. Get yr kleenex boxes ready! (I was talking to the historical romance fans who, y'know, get emotional about all the torrid romance and tragedy and such. Ahem.)

Fred Armisen, thank you for taking to task the annoying douchebags who rock out to their music, oblivious to their surroundings, on the bus or train or in other public spaces. "I can't deal with other people making their musical tastes known to everybody else. I don't like people bobbing their heads or getting into stuff at all. It should be private....I don't even tap my feet. I hate that." This has long been a pet peeve of mine in the city. I couldn't agree more.

Can anyone confirm for me that Danger Mouse really is only 28, as this New York Times Magazine profile claims? I can't find a birth year listed on either allmusic or Wikipedia. I guess it really doesn't matter; I just find the realization that he's, like, my age kind of remarkable. Also, I can't stand Chuck Klosterman. That line "There were no throngs of pretty girls, although there were several girls dressed as if they thought they were pretty" is just beyond offensive.

S/FJ's "oily pec-off" turn-of-phrase made me laugh out loud here.

Space + ancient Egypt = GeekOverload.com. Loves it.

"Slap Your Knee and Say Ouch" is sososo funny. Bonus points, too, for some Ben Kweller love. (Stereogum has a new Kwellah MP3, "Penny on the Train Track," from his forthcoming self-titled disk.)

I'm obsessed this week with that new Girl Talk album Night Ripper. Listening to it feels like compressing a cross-country road trip down into 42 frenzied minutes, that feeling of speeding, exhausted but wired on caffeine, down unfamiliar highways, cramped but kind of giddy, switching radio stations as you drift in and out of reception, wondering if driving over the next state line is going to bring oldies, hip-hop, or the best indie rock programming you never would have expected to find just outside Tulsa city limits. Your favorite tracks will largely be determined by how many of the samples you recognize and how much you're amused by their juxtaposition; right now I'm all about "Minute by Minute," which, as the Pitchfork reviewer mentions, samples Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945," but also sneaks Sophie B. Hawkins and Steely Dan in there, among many (many, many) others.

Monday, July 17, 2006

RIP, Mickey Spillane

If you've seen Kiss Me Deadly, then you know what's in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. RIP, Mickey Spillane, you crazy old bastard.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

(Over a month ago, I was contacted by a representative from M80, a company that provides "online grassroots marketing" services for big companies like the Gap, Miramax, Comedy Central, House of Blues, and Interscope Records who are trying to figure out how to harness the power of blog-buzz for their products. Based on my mention of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in my dual write-up on The Proposition and Lady Vengeance, they asked if they could send me a gratis copy of the recently released two-disc Collector's Edition DVD of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to review here. I said yes.)

I find myself growing bored with collectors' editions and endless amounts of special features on DVDs. My ever-decreasing attention span to one side, I think a large part of it is nothing more than the fact that the novelty of having easy access to all that behind-the-scenes footage is just wearing off. (Whither the heady excitement of the early days of building my DVD collection?) Not to mention that, as pointless and predictable EPK interviews become ubiquitous on DVDs, online, and in multiplexes, the quality-to-quantity ratio is discouraging enough that I simply don't have the patience anymore to slog through it all at home on my relatively crappy TV for one interesting observation from the fight choreographer. The amount of the drug I have to consume to get that same old high just isn't worth it for me anymore.

All that being said, it's curious to spend time with two discs' worth of special features for a movie I don't really care about one way or the other. I think I'd only seen it once before, a couple years ago when I was at the height of my irrational hatred for Robert Redford (I've subsequently crested that wave and seem to be settling down into a kind of bemused annoyance), and pretty much felt the same about it then as I feel about it now. I respect its popularity and influence on cheekily self-aware deconstructions of genre flicks, but, for whatever reason, it just doesn't touch or resonate with me at all.

So, perhaps the most valuable thing I got out of the whole experience was some satisfaction for my curiosity about director George Roy Hill. Butch Cassidy is the only film on his resume that I've seen, but unlike, say, Sam Peckinpah or Peter Bogdanovich, whose work I am similarly ill-versed in, I had gleaned essentially no generalized, even stereotypical, sense of his auteur's fingerprint from the pop-culture ether over my years of watching movies. On the first page of my notes from the day I started watching one of the supplemental documentaries, I even wrote, "who is George Roy Hill? I know he's the director, but what else has he done?"

I think part of the reason my ignorance about Hill, and perhaps also my ambivalence toward the film as a whole, bothered me as much as it did was because of my knee-jerk assumption that since this movie came out in 1969, in the early days of the American New Wave, I should have been able to identify it in terms of its director's authorial voice, yet couldn't. And the more I mulled it over, the more I began to realize that my tendency would be to identify this movie as anybody's but the director's. It's easy to credit the film to Newman and Redford, whose sexy, insouciant acting style set the bar for four subsequent decades of similar performances that often nail the sex and insouciance without the actual acting chops to back it up. (I mean, for only one example, Clooney and Pitt in Ocean's 11 are pretty much direct descendants of this exact buddy movie energy.) It's equally easy to call the film Goldman's, still one of the few screenwriters in Hollywood who we can identify by name and general style, or Bacharach's, whose minimal yet insidiously memorable score defines a huge part of the feel of the film. In my geekier moments, I would even venture to claim that the film actually belongs to Conrad Hall, one of the all-time great cinematographers who helped us as an audience become aware of what the camera was doing, who recognized that beautiful shooting wasn't always flawless shooting and made it safe for us to relish lens flares, sudden in-camera zooms, and other idiosyncracies that would have been unthinkable in the classical Hollywood style. But never would I have said, "oh yes, this film's got George Roy Hill written all over it."

Yet, as soon as I started watching the special features, I found a deluge of anecdotes and testimonials to Hill's strong personality and artistic vision. Just remark after remark about how instrumental he was in the construction of the final project, how he creatively and respectfully sparred with the actors over their choices and opinions, how he orchestrated a two-month-long practical joke on Redford, how his commitment and energy held the entire shoot together even after his back went out and he spent a good portion of it directing laid out on a pallet, and how he went to the mat defending the more iconoclastic, and now iconic, aspects of the film (casting a then relatively unknown Redford opposite Newman at the height of his popularity, the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" musical sequence, the tweaking of traditional Western conventions by showing Butch and Sundance running away from the law rather than standing firm and fighting, the tonal mingling of comedy and tragedy throughout).

And this impression doesn't just come from others' accounts. There's a wonderfully retro-feeling making-of documentary from 1994 included on one of the two discs that illustrates, in his own words, the gruff veteran's demeanor everyone else kept going on about. It gives a great sense of Hill's gloves-off approach (complete with f-bombs flying). And it makes his deceptive invisibility even more puzzling. Is that his actual innovation here, the actual proof of a true auteur's hand--that he exerted control so assured that it gave a strong and unselfish frame that would allow ample space for the other contributors' work to be actively noticed and appreciated? If so, that's some amazing fucking ninja stealth, that kind of ability to lead from behind, to make it look like everyone else is doing the work when it's only through his (luckily, benevolent) master plan to grant them the latitude to labor under that perception. Of course, I'm not ruling out the possibility that I might be reading all this through my own ignorance and lack of context for his body of work; he did win the Best Director Academy Award for The Sting just a few years later, beating out--get this--Bergman, Bertolucci, a young George Lucas, and William Friedkin. Perhaps I'll feel differently if I ever get around to seeing The Sting or Slap Shot or The World According to Garp. (See, though, did any of you know he directed those movies? Or did you just mentally categorize them as that other Newman/Redford movie, that Newman hockey movie, and that Robin Williams/John Irving movie with John Lithgow in drag?) I dunno; I'm not entirely convinced of my own argument. At any rate, it's a neat little mystery to puzzle out, reconstituting the boundaries of an unfashionable American movie master.

And, of course, as often happens to me when I spend some considerable time with a movie I may have been ambivalent about before, I've developed a begrudging affection for Butch Cassidy. Paul Newman is a nearly perfect human; anything I have to say on the matter is going to pale in comparison to watching his movies or doing a Google image search and drinking in the dreaminess. (I know it's all about the baby blues, but has anybody taken a look at this man's nose recently? Just beautiful.) You can see Redford working really hard to be worthy of this career-making role, but I can forgive him almost anything in this movie for the sake of the moment when, before the ball-kicking knife fight, Butch tells Sundance, "Listen, I don't mean to be a sore loser, but when it's done, if I'm dead, kill him," and Sundance drawls in response, "Love to," then looks up with that little wave and slowly breaking homicidal smile. I could just watch that exchange on repeat for hours. And, unlike the bon mot from my hypothetical fight choreographer, I'm totally willing to watch, and rewatch, a demonstrably well-made movie I may not happen to like for the sake of coming across a gem like that.

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Coming Soon


Snakes on a Plane
Originally uploaded by wrestlingentropy.

"Get these mothafuckin' snakes offa this mothafuckin' building!"

This is the first billboard ad I've seen for Snakes on a Plane, and it's conveniently located in the 'hood, just off the Western brown line stop. This makes me so happy.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

I Can't Believe You Care

Oh, fuck me in the ear and call me Sally: the Guillemots performing "Made Up Love Song #43" on Top of the Pops (via Stylus). Just an unbelievably great performance. Their new full-length Through the Windowpane is out now in the UK and will be released in the US on July 20.

Dear Brown Line: what is the deal with the morning delays? Seriously. I left early today and was still only just barely on time. Get yr act together, bitches.

Pitchfork reviews Victory for the Comic Muse in its entirety today. It's a decent write-up; I can't really complain.

RIP, Syd Barrett.

Monday, July 03, 2006

Final Fantasy at the Lakeshore Theater

A regular diet of mid-tempo, mid-range, guitar-based indie rock can only sustain a person for so long until she starts to feel glutted with whimsy and melancholy, so I think I've been somewhat intentionally trying to balance myself out with a little more active hip-hop consumption recently. Bass feels good. In-your-face rhythmic intensity feels good. However, as the old adage goes, you can take the indie rock out of the girl's iPod, but you can't take the indie rock out of the girl, which is how I found myself irresistibly drawn to the Lakeshore Theater on Friday night to take in Final Fantasy's last show in the U.S. before returning home to his native Canada. I've been keeping a cautious eye on young Mr. Pallett, mostly thanks to the thoughtful rantings at Zoilus and Said the Gramophone and gushing show reviews like the ones excerpted at Brooklyn Vegan (and, of course, also thanks to that Bloc Party cover I keep going on about), and I knew I'd kick myself if I didn't catch him while he was in town. Owen--who, violin and bow in hand, surrounded like Gulliver by an army of Lilliputian looping pedals, started his set with the droll pronouncement "thanks for coming to the Final Fantasy rock 'n' roll show. I am Final"--certainly didn't disappoint, but his performance was almost more satisfying thanks to the way the night's three acts operated as counterpoints to each other and the way the venue itself contributed to the overall pacing and atmosphere.

I love Chicago, and I love visiting venues in the city I've never been to before. From what I gather, the Lakeshore Theater usually hosts live theater of the Defending the Caveman variety, but it seems that the Empty Bottle has started scheduling acts there, too. (Em-effing Jello Biafra in the hizzouse today.) Kittens, it's amazing what actually sitting down in an actual theater can do for your interaction with and appreciation of a show. Maybe it was also because I'd just read the interview with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) in the June/July Believer earlier that morning, but I felt like I was more sensitive to the music as music and was listening more actively to it than I have at a show in longer than I'd realized. Chalk it up to feeling feeling lovingly enveloped by the decent sound system or not needing to bob and weave to see the performers around the slopes of other people's shoulders or not having to will my ears not to be distracted by the banal, beer-fueled, self-important scenesters' conversations that are usually a consequence of attending buzzworthy shows or whatever, but it was a refreshing change of pace and perfect for the kind of music we were there to hear.

Alex Lukashevsky was billed as Final Fantasy's touring partner and opener, but before he came on, we were treated to unbilled local boys Baby and Hide. (The few times they announced their name from stage, I kept thinking they were saying "Baby in Hide," which I didn't understand and thought was weird and kind of stupid, but when I got home later that night and tried to Google them, I realized it was in fact "Baby and Hide," which immediately made me think, "oh my God, what a fucking great name!") They came off like Yo La Tengo's dorky younger brothers, these three terribly dressed, pasty looking white dudes with their guitars and keyboard and drum set containing nothing more than two toms and a sizzle cymbal, and at first I couldn't tell if they were truly awful or if they just might be diamonds in the rough. The group's mastermind Jeremy Keller especially seemed like the painfully shy, crippingly socially awkward kid who lived down the dorm hall from you during your freshman year in college, that kid who never seemed to worry too much about his neuroscience or astrophysics classes, that kid who you discovered much later spent most of his time that year secretly building robots that could compose their own symphonies, that kid who you discovered even later than that had been dating an unstoppably hot biochem/performance studies double major that whole time because she recognized his true inner beauty and unlimited potential. Anyway, all this sort of made me not want to look at them while they were playing. I fought myself for being shallow and judgmental for a while, but eventually just gave up and sat through about the last third of their songs with my eyes closed. Which is when I was finally able to give in to what they were trying to accomplish with dynamics and noise and subtle sonic shifts. They were teasing some really gorgeous stuff out of droney keyboard bits and minimal yet apocalyptic drumming and earnest, high-pitched, slightly nasal vocals like the unholy spawn of Neil Young and Ben Gibbard. I ended up being really impressed. Their recent full-length Normal People is available to download for free at their website, and, though the MP3s might not do to you what seeing them live live did to me, it's deffo worth checking out. (Try either "Black Delicatessen" or "In Sails.")

Alex Lukashevsky is one of those old-soul acoustic guitar players with a whisky stained oak barrel of a voice and conversational, rather than confessional, lyrics. (Some of my favorite lines--such as "gonna get me a girlfriend and do whatever she says" and "even if she's an alcoholic, an impossible genius like Jackson Pollock"--come from "Nun or a Bawd," which can be found on his band Deep Dark United's album Ancient and can be downloaded here.) Though not as ostentatiously exuberant as Jonathan Richman, there was something in his approach that reminded me of everyone's favorite Modern Lover, a similar kind of gentle, highly literate playfulness and the beautiful, quietly powerful stage presence of a performer who's completely comfortable in his own skin. The way his music and persona seamlessly supported and fed into each other provided the perfect bridge between the avert-your-eyes quality of Baby and Hide and Final Fantasy's aesthetic magnetism.

And, oh yes, aesthetic magnetism is the term for what Owen Pallett has going on in spades. With that beautiful profile of his--which should be chiseled out of marble or etched on a vase in a museum somewhere--a voice almost too pure for mass consumption, musical chops that go on for miles, and an intimacy with his instrument that I think I've only ever seen between Ben Folds and his piano, it was all I could do to give myself permission to even blink while he was on stage, lest I miss an ounce of the magic he was conjuring out of thin air. But even for all of that, it was his proficiency with the looping pedals that put the performance over the top. He cocked up the loops in one song toward the middle of the set ("I don't usually mess up," he apologized. "It sounds like boasting, but...but, it feels great!"; the sarcasm could have flattened the skyline), but his virtuosity with the technology really gave us way more than our money's worth. I'm completely won over. (Buy He Poos Clouds or explore some choice MP3s here.)

(Also, for those of you who aren't busy enterting my name and URL into Technorati every few days, you may have missed my shout-out on Green Pea-ness last week. Thx, James.)