Gone Baby Gone and Last Week's Minor Web Detritus

Gone Baby Gone is a pretty decent directorial debut for Ben Affleck, but my threshold for Bleak really hasn't gotten any higher with age; I can still only stand so much before I want to stab myself in the face. Seriously. I was in an incredibly crappy mood for the rest of the night after I left the theater, and I think it was just because, well, bleah: child abuse and molestation and corruption and The Downtrodden. I mean, yeah, I was curious to see the flick, but, in a more cosmic sense, remind me why I paid cash money to have my brain filled with stories of some of the worst aspects of humanity, stories that only confirm the shit that I know exists in the world without helping me understand it any better than, say, a nightly newscast? And, what's even worse, you're supposed to feel somehow ennobled by thinking deep thoughts about these topics after the movie lets out. Like some sort of freshman year ethics course, the movie very clearly wants to incite you to really dig into the flash-point debates it's built around, such as What's Best for the Child? and Is the True to Be Valued Above the Good? Oh good lord, do I just not have the emotional energy for those kinds of discussions. And, while, obviously, children need to be protected and taken care of in the face of all manner of grown up nastiness, there's this hysterical pitch of "OMG, but the chilllldrennn!!" that basically forms the core of the film and seems not necessarily shrill and not necessarily disingenuous, but like it's really a stand-in for something else. Of course, this nearly operatic level of keening isn't exclusive to this movie, nor is it exclusive to the subject of the Sanctity of Childhood (the whole Ellen DeGeneres dog adoption debacle is basically pointing at the same thing), but all the energy expended in the service of hammering home the point that children are these precious little angels, they give our lives meaning, they deserve better, etc., etc. struck me as really kind of protesting too much. Again, I know I sound like kind of an asshole right now, and it's not at all that I don't agree that kids don't deserve the abuse that too many of them so often get, but...isn't that kind of the point? That who, aside from the worst sociopaths, is going to disagree? Some portion of that excess of righteous fury seems like it would be better directed at, say, the atrocities of war currently being perpetrated by the United States government, and I think that fact is actually key: in a time of "outrage fatigue," we're having trouble finding a more or less safe outlet for our mourning and our compassion. The facts of the war (and Darfur and the environment and) can get so fraught with bitter, often needlessly divisive political associations that, on the whole, it's become incredibly difficult to find a safe place to put all our devastated, gut-churning, heart-heavy sadness. And, not just a place to put it, but a place where others can really hear it and empathize with it with equal fervor. So, it busts out wherever it can. It busts out around children and pets and breast cancer and other basically uncontroversial issues that, again, while obviously important, become these cultural totems for an idea of caring, an idea of justifiable fist-shaking at the often indiscriminate cruelty of the universe. Which is actually an incredibly hopeful thing to realize right now; that our impulse toward compassion is so strong that it needs an outlet, a pressure valve, even if has to coagulate somewhere it's ultimately not even doing that much good.

Anyway. Crab, crab, crab. Like I say, it's decently directed, even though, like you'd expect of an amateur director, he has trouble trusting the camera to represent mental states and temporal shifts (he does a rather cheesy color-faded, echo chamber effect on conversations that happened in the past; longtime readers will remember this is similar to one of the problems I had with The Last King of Scotland). The plot resolution is also somewhat unsatisfying, relying as it does on an elaborate conspiracy. As we all know, a movie with a trick ending needs to be satisfying even without its trick ending, and the gotcha in this one, while coherent enough to tie up a fair amount of loose ends, kind of just makes you go "oh." The knowing should have felt just as complex as the not-knowing. Performances are good on the whole. I will have no truck with the critics who think Casey Affleck was miscast and/or cast only because of nepotism. He does a stunning job of keeping his babyface cuteness balanced with an underdog's hunger to prove himself to/against the entrenched power structure and a naturally gifted but young man's arrogance that his intelligence and the purity of his intentions make him all but infallible. Dude is very clearly having a moment. Amy Ryan is 100 percent as good as all the reviews have said she is (the phrase "hell for leather" comes up a lot about her performance), and it's great to see Titus Welliver, long one of my favorite actors on Deadwood, use that great quality he has of coming off as a fundamentally well-meaning guy who's simply caught up in circumstances that are just a shade beyond him.

Here's Catbirdseat's now apparently annual Music Blogger Best of 2007 Cheat Sheet. Um, yup, pretty much. (For extra Catbirdseat fun, I have no idea how old this is, but OMG funny: Guide to Indie Rock Hair Styles. It's a different kind of sarcastic than what you're expecting, I promise. And Malkmus jokes? Somehow always hilarious.)

It's so ridiculous as to almost be embarrassing how much I enjoy the many variations on the whole lolcats meme. I've recently been introduced to lolsecretz; here's my fave so far. (Thanks, MS.)

Zach Galifianakis gives us a reasoned and trenchant analysis of contemporary physical comedy in just a few short minutes (via).

I'm sure everyone saw this long, fantastic piece on David Simon and The Wire in The New Yorker back whenever it was first posted (or whenever Kottke first linked it), but I just got around to reading it within the last week or so. Stunning. Yes, I'm officially the biggest fan of The Wire who's never actually seen a single episode. (Thanks again, JA.)

Better late than never, I guess: here we have videographical proof that Clipse indeed provided one of the best sets of the weekend at this year's Pitchfork Music Festival.

If I'd had any idea that both Neko Case AND Dan Bejar would be touring with the New Pornographers this fall, I certainly would not have skipped out on their show(s) at the Metro earlier this month. I only discovered this fact while scrolling through Kirstiecat's predictably stunning pics and nearly slammed my head against my keyboard when I saw the full band lineup. Challengers has really been growing on me and the two of them (esp. Bejar) play out with the band so incredibly rarely, so...bummer, man.

Bushman on Baba

Quoth Bushman, who's been listening to the Who a lot lately: "If anyone tells you that they felt the influence of classical minimalism because of the synthesizer part in Baba O'Riley, you have my full and utter permission to KICK THEM IN THE HEAD. A repetitive ostinato over COMPLETELY FUNCTIONAL POP HARMONIES does not minimalism make. :) Yes, I know the title is supposedly in reference to Terry Riley, and as such the band claims such influence. I'm just saying, the concept lost something- oh wait, EVERYTHING in the translation. Great, they used a bloody synthesizer and looped it- but its usage has no position of importance in the development of the song, and even gets transposed around to go with the riffs. Awesome tune? Certainly. Great texture? Truly. Minimal? For fucks sake, it's THE WHO. Everyone is tearing it up, and you end with a time change and a fade to a needless (but fun) violin solo."

I love having friends who know more about stuff than I do.

Spoon, Live at the Riv (I Also Saw Some Movies)

Hit the Spoon show at the Riv on Friday night. It was so great to finally see them live in a theater, where all the propulsive energy they unleashed could be contained and harnessed and manipulated more acutely. Spoon's expert minimalism is such an easy talking point by now, but it's still such a thing of beauty to behold, especially to my ears, which are so accustomed to orchestral bombast and wall of sound. Their songs are these little miracles, walking around and beating people up despite the fact that they have no skeletons! Or, if skeletons they do have, they're the hollowed-out, bird skeleton kind. Fragile and delicate and uniquely adapted to flight in their particular environments. My one sort of major-ish complaint about the evening is that it really sped by. And I don't think it was just that I was enjoying myself so much; all the grooves felt a couple clicks too fast. "The Beast and Dragon, Adored" seemed most glaringly up-tempo, when it should have lingered malevolently in the air as a kind of slow, ballsy stomper. They also, curiously, arranged their setlist chronologically, many of the songs in album order, too. I dunno; if I were in a more cynical mood about it, I probably would have found it annoying or pandering, but I actually think it was kind of genius. The night wasn't paced like a typical rock show, where there's a big explosion when they first start playing, then a mellow-out while they whip through the older songs for the more hardcore fans, and then another explosion for the set-ending barn-burner, before the requisite encore. The setlist, in actuality, at least from where I was sitting, allowed for an effective crescendo up to the newest songs (songs that pretty much everyone was guaranteed to know). It gave the audience a reason to keep blowing up, repeatedly, to suspend their excitement throughout the show, so that by the time we made it to "You Got Yr Cherry Bomb," "The Underdog," and "Black Like Me" (not to mention "Chicago at Night"), the place was in veritable rock and roll ecstasy. Oh, Spoonsters--you Zen masters, you! Using minimum effort for maximum results. (In the conservation of energy sense; no one would ever dare call these dudes lazy. They just work, and play, smarter.) Also, I kind of wouldn't be surprised if the next album, whenever it comes out, is full of songs like "The Ghost of You Lingers." I don't think I'd ever really heard what an exquisitely fine song it is, but live, its strongest points absolutely could not be denied. Thrilling. Pictures from the night are here.

Finally had a chance to catch up with The Darjeeling Limited late last week. I have no real reading of the piece yet; I need to sit with it some more, and see it again soon. I know I'm usually queen of the knee-jerk, but past experience has taught me that Anderson's films don't start revealing their true essence until at least the third viewing, so I'm withholding judgment for now. But, overall, on a fairly shallow level, I liked it. I liked when Adrien Brody says "I liked how mean you are" to Schwartzman about his autobiographical short story near the end. I liked the way they used Schwartzman as the one who gets all the tail; it supports the theory I started formulating, circa Shopgirl, that, post-Cusack, he's the thinking girl's pin-up boy for this decade. I liked that the scene(s) in the convent were, as far as the mise-en-scene goes anyway, almost direct homage to Black Narcissus. I'm also totally fascinated by the way that Anderson, as a director, has, in one way or another, abused Owen Wilson in every movie they've done together, and by the fact that it's only gotten more intense the more famous Wilson has gotten. I don't mean to be indulging in any tabloid schadenfreude here, but come on--he's wrapped in bandages throughout Darjeeling, the casually cruel yet oblivious, bossy oldest brother/surrogate father figure who can't, despite his best (?) efforts, hold any of his relationships together, much less his own body. This, of course, comes on the heels of the delectable meta-punishment of The Life Aquatic, where Esteban, the fictional director Zissou's best friend, gets eaten by a shark only a few minutes into the movie, and Wilson, as an actor, is forced to subsume his most valuable asset as a Hollywoodized commodity, his wry, wily charm, to play an incredibly wide-eyed naif who also dies a violent, watery death. Um, all of this would seem to me to be the sound of Anderson working out some, uh, issues. And detractors accuse him of being twee. Anyway, additional thoughts on the film to come when I least expect it, I'm sure.

Lust, Caution is apparently Ang Lee's best attempt at a Wong Kar-Wai impression. (He even steals Tony Leung Chiu Wai for the male lead.) Yawn. It's a nice, safe middlebrow examination of loyalty and sexuality and torpid self-seriousness in times of war. I guess. It's not overly gorgeous visually, merely serviceable, and the sex (whether real or simply realistic) doesn't do much to enrich the politics of the piece, or vice-versa. I was all set to get up on my high horse about how the only way the sex scenes would have been interesting was if the Mr. Yee character, instead of revealing himself to be (surprise!) the sadist in the relationship, would have showed up for his first assignation with Wong Chia Chi/Mak Tai Tai with a desire to get tied up or flagellated or something. But then I realized that that plot twist would have annoyed me just as much. ("Of course they'd go to the easy plot point of showing that the political hardass who's collaborating with the Japanese deep down just wants to be spanked," etc., etc.) So, I'm not sure what would have redeemed the film for me. Other than it just being better. In summation: BROKBAK KITTEH WISHES HE CUD KWIT U.

Sasha Frere-Jones throws it down in this week's New Yorker. I don't have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge at my fingertips to be able to effectively enter the ring in the debate, but I do admit that any exceptions I've been able to come up with (like Beck) kind of seem to just reinforce the point rather than modify or challenge it. Which is as it should be, probably. Also, be sure not to miss the follow-up post on his own blog with the extra-strength linking action to the fantabulous Lester Bangs piece from approx. thirty years earlier covering pretty much the exact same issues ("nothing short of a hydrogen bomb," indeed).

Jesse James and Of Montreal

The Great Benji Kelnardo (no relation to The Late B.P. Helium) had an assignment for one of his business of film classes to see a movie in its first weekend of release, so I tagged along with him to catch The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on Saturday night. I liked that it was moody and stylish (helped in large part by the stunning Nick Cave/Warren Ellis score), but I don't think it quite accomplishes as much as it thinks it does. It's overly long, and overly ponderous, and doesn't really achieve the kind of stretched taut tension you need in a two-hour-forty-minute movie in order to pull off all those scenes of characters breaking into waves of alternately nervous and hysterical laughter and all those deathly long silences while dust motes float in the air. It just rings a little hollow. (Also, post-Gladiator can we please put a stop on scenes of tough guys walking through windswept wheat fields already? That was, like, almost literally the only thing I liked about Gladiator and the more I see that visual trope used elsewhere, the more it smacks of really uninspired gesturing toward suppressed sensitivity or spirituality or sensuality or whatever. Bleah.) The film's also very clearly supposed to be some kind of commentary on celebrity culture in America, the dance of flattery and cannibalism between outsized public personalities and their worshipful fans, but I'm not sure it's really actually doing anything with that theme, other than congratulating itself for the supposedly ingenious casting of Brad Pitt as Jesse James. As Dana Stevens points out at Slate, "There's one thing Pitt and James don't have in common. Pitt is not, to all appearances, a barking lunatic," which makes it slightly difficult to know where one's sympathies are supposed to lie. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for moral ambiguity, but some sort of coherent worldview has got to be driving this boat, and instead I felt like I was just left drifting while Pitt and Casey Affleck made goo-goo eyes at each other for nearly three hours.

That said, Casey Affleck has a veritable symphony of goo-goo eyes going on in this movie. He's fantastic. Absolutely steals the piece. I think he's turning into our generation's Chris Penn (no small praise, that), the younger brother of the more alpha-mainstream star who skulks around the edges of the industry doing (to steal a few phrases from the eminent Cintra) "red-faced humiliation....The hyper-vulnerable, exposed weakness of the bed-wetter, the fuckup, the sad sack, the hapless loser, the beta male" with subtly beautiful aplomb. The rest of the casting--with the exception of Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel being utterly Wasted with a capital What the Fuck--is really quite good as well. Paul Schneider is spot-on with his southern charm and sly wit as a backwoods Casanova surrounded by hapless rubes, and it's great to see Garret Dillahunt getting film work (um, even if it is in other westerns) after his dual roles as Jack McCall and Francis Wolcott on Deadwood. I wish someone would tell me what kind of career Sam Rockwell is supposed to be having; he's wonderful as ever here, if not exactly going above and beyond the call of duty, but it seems like this second-banana role should have been filled by a less-established actor. I think he's great, and charming as hell, and I just keep waiting for him to really break out as a leading man the way he was supposed to after Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. And, as for Pitt...well, I'm not exactly sure what he was doing that earned him the best actor at the Venice Film Festival this year, but it's nice to see him get back to using some of that caged volatility that's gotten buried underneath his family man persona these days. Plus, along with Nicole Kidman, he's got to be one of the great on-screen criers in contemporary cinema. Few actors can do that kind of sudden cloud-burst of emotion coupled with the "gimme a minute" breakdown as well as he does.

Of Montreal continues to impress live. RTW and I caught their Sunday-night show at the Metro, and they just rocked it the fuck out. They've got a hell of an impressive stage setup (this YouTube clip from a recent show in Knoxville [via] should give you the general sense of what they're doing as far as lighting and multiple levels), and there's just no denying the cataclysmic awesomeness of the tunes from Hissing Fauna. Simply put, they just sound more expansive and sophisticated than any of the stuff they played from their earlier albums. They also tried out a few new ones that are supposed to appear on the next full-length, including a funky as hell, self-described "slow jam" that comes off as what Midnite Vultures would probably sound like to me if I actually wanted to have sex with Beck. Given the fact that I've basically decided to take a pass on any kind of fanship or affection for Arcade Fire, I'm glad to have borderline obsessively embraced the one other band this year that's really putting a lot of effort into their stage spectacle and backing it up with songs that show no sign of wearing out their welcome. As ever, pics are up on Flickr.

Speaking of bands I've given up trying to like, I think I'm done with Beirut. Zach Condon just bugs me.

Indie Rock Covers and the Demise of Deadwood

It's been a great week so far for indie rock covers. Early this week we were treated to the Streets' awesomely earnest take on Elton John's "Your Song" (that totally crap-ass plastic beat that comes in at 1:52 just destroys me; I love it). And then yesterday saw the posting of Stereogum's follow-up to their tribute to OK Computer with a tribute to Automatic for the People. After a very cursory listen, I'm digging Rogue Wave's inventive cover of "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight," the Meat Puppets' brilliant taking-the-piss version of "Everybody Hurts" (think more the scene from Felicity when Noel is singing it while laying in the dark on the couch after he and Felicity don't have sex, and less its iconic use in My So-Called Life), and Sara Quin's (of Tegan & Sara) duet with Kaki King on "Sweetness Follows." Be sure to check out Matthew Fluxblog's contextualizing essay as well.

A good week for indie rockers is a bad week for TV watchers, unfortunately. Kottke brings us news that Deadwood won't, in fact, culminate with the two two-hour movies that were promised to substitute for a fourth season. Boo! This news is especially bittersweet for LK and myself who are currently making our way through the third season on DVD. I literally can't help myself from shrieking with delight at the end of each episode, no matter how emotionally gut-wrenching; it's just that fucking good, cocksuckers.

The Onion AV Club lists 24 Great Films Too Painful to Watch Twice. It's a fairly decent list, and one to which I would enthusiastically add Miguel Arteta's Chuck and Buck. It's not as graphically violent or disturbing as Irreversible or Requiem for a Dream, but the emotions are so complicated and awkward and trenchant, I don't think I could bring myself to watch it again even five years after I first saw it.

Extremely interesting interview with David Allen, author of the omnipresent (at least by intarweb standards) Getting Things Done, wherein it is revealed that the creator of a productivity system that inspires such cult-like devotion...is actually a member of a cult himself!

As many of you know, I'm a psycho super-fan of Adam Gopnik and I've previously quoted reverently from "Death of a Fish," the first of his New Yorker essays I ever read. I remember searching for the piece online so I could link directly to the full text, but couldn't find it anywhere at the time. I was pleasantly surprised to discover yesterday, though, completely accidentally, that The Observer ran the same essay, in its entirety, two years ago under a different title, "Pet theories." Read and enjoy, my kittens! Now if I can just find a digital copy of "The Last of the Metrozoids," I won't have to keep photocopying it out of Through the Children's Gate every time I want to turn somebody on to his stuff.

(Incidentally, this is apparently my 400th post on Blogger. I don't really put much stock in milestones of this nature, but...damn. Thanks, as always, for sticking around, my bebes.)