Et Voila

Ask, and ye shall etc., etc. Downloads from their forthcoming album are now available on the Doveman web site. (Contrary to my previous, erroneous, assumption, other MP3s had been already been available there, but buried at the bottom of the main Doveman page.) I'm happy to report that the tunes, "Honey" and "Teacup," are almost better than they have a right to be. The vocals aren't doing anything for me (and I swear it's not just because I had my mind set on hating them!), but the melodies are lovely and the instrumentation is sexy, woozy, lush, yet restrained. I'm (reservedly) impressed.

And, for those of you keeping score at home, Picaresque is everything I hoped it would be. I can't say enough about Meloy's talents as a songwriter, and this album captures the band in stunning form. Rachel Blumberg is a force to be reckoned with on drums; I'm sad this is her final album with the group. At the risk of just gushing and going into ecstasies before I'm really ready to give up my initial, visceral, emotional attachment to this batch of songs and get all cerebral about it, I feel like I can safely say that this album is remarkable for the way it's united by narrative moments where the powerless become powerful, the powerful become powerless, or the nexus of the two. Fans of Shockheaded Peter and the Lemony Snicket books will find much to love in the nine-minute epic "The Mariner's Revenge Song"; fans of Hedwig and the Angry Inch should find that familiar lump-in-the-throat feeling anew in "On the Bus Mall"; fans of Belle and Sebastian's classic "Stars of Track and Field" will find an heir to it in "The Sporting Life." As for me, my current favorite song is "The Engine Driver," which we had the great good fortune to hear Colin play solo back in January. That's all I'm giving you for now, kittens. Like I said, I still need to protect my feelings about it for a little while.

Your Life Remains Yours

A poem from Oblivio.

ArtPad

Oh, holy crap, have you SEEN this web site? Behold the Art.com ArtPad! It is unspeakably awesome and irritatingly addictive. I'm really glad my computer at work isn't speedy enough to run the higher version of Flash required to use the site or else I'd be staring down the barrel of a new favorite time-waster. Thanks to BAK for turning me on to it.

Here's some art I made tonight:

* Interpol concert (that one's for you, Mac)

* Dill (that one's for you, LBL[A])

* Chicago in March (that one's for you, Nora Rocket)

Gear Theft

In an unfortunate coincidence, right after I finally got around to purchasing tickets for the Decemberists' show at the Metro on April 7, all their gear got stolen. (This was reported on both the Decemberists' site and on Pitchfork.) Though the trailer itself was soon recovered and none of the tour dates (except for Vancouver) have been cancelled, all their gear is still missing. We're talking hurdy-gurdies and gorgeous French accordions and shit. Needless to say, this sucks. You can donate money to help the band begin to replace some of this stuff. At the very least, you should go out and buy their new album Picaresque on its release date tomorrow. (You should've been planning on it anyway, dear readers!)

Got 'Em

I bought the damn tickets last night.

29 Thoughts

The "29 Thoughts on the Apparent Sexiness of" column on Nerve still cracks me up. (I wonder how long that will last.) This week: 29 Thoughts on the Absolute, Categorical Unsexiness of the Michael Jackson Trial. Number eight, perhaps predictably, made me laugh out loud; number twelve earned a low-octave snort/guffaw thing. Enjoy.

Annoyed/Not Annoyed

Annoyed at the snow. Annoyed at the black-and-white checkered parachute pants I see all the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago students wearing when they get off the train with me at the Chicago brown line stop in the morning. (Ugh, it's even worse when they're rolling their little wheelie bags full of KNIVES.) Annoyed to find out that Wes Anderson is directing commercials for Dasani bottled water (link via You Can't Make It Up). Annoyed at the misuse and abuse of the word "empowering". Annoyed at myself that I still haven't found time to haul my ass up to the Metro to get Decemberists concert tickets (sorry M&M and CTA).

But. I am not annoyed at this very funny McSweeney's list. I am also not annoyed that I'll be flying to Virginia tomorrow. Also not annoyed that this book finally went to the printer yesterday. Very not annoyed at my new favorite lipstick (color="Flame").

Easter 1982

"Gimme some gah-damn PUDDING! (And change my diaper.)" 

BAK and I found this in the Chicago red line station on Tuesday night. Though completely sober, we laughed so hard we cried. It's just too beautiful. She felt bad taking it, but I warned her that the worst thing about me taking it would be that I'd be sure to surprise her with it again when she's least expecting it in an effort to make her pee her pants. Mission, hopefully, accomplished.

(I also plan on submitting it to Found Magazine.)

Proselytizing Buffy

For those of you who've always entertained the idea of getting into Buffy the Vampire Slayer but have been too overwhelmed by the idea of jumping headlong into seven seasons' worth of DVDs without knowing quite what you're getting yourself into (or just what the big deal is), and for those of you who are already rabid fans but have been trying for ages to convert that one stubborn friend (who you just know would love the show) without a convincing way to ease him/her into the time commitment it necessarily requires, a friend of a friend has devised a brilliant primer to meet your needs. From the eminent Steve Maxey:

I'm trying to make a new Buffy fan here at work.

Joanne said she was never interested in Buffy for the same reasons she was never interested in Star Trek. I said it was in some ways more like Twin Peaks (which she liked) than Star Trek--story arcs that take up the entire season, characters living both in a real world we recognize and a shadow world, and a visual style.

I talked her into trying a four- or five-episode arc.

So this morning I gave her the Season 2 box with this note of instruction:

---------------
Buffy: The Buffy-Angelus chapter

A five-episode arc (with an optional sixth)

* Surprise (episode 13; disc 4, ep 1)
* Innocence (episode 14; disc 4, ep 2)
* Passion (episode 17; disc 5, ep 1)
* (optional) I Only Have Eyes for You (episode 19; disc 5,
ep 3)
* Becoming, part 1 (episode 21, disc 6, ep 1)
* Becoming, part 2 (episode 22, disc 6, ep 2)

Backstory: The relationships between Buffy and Angel and between Giles and Jenny have been developing slowly over the past two years. Everything else you need to know is revealed in the first 10 minutes of "Surprise."

"To me, Buffy was a real girl. These were metaphors for real demons. This was about how, in high school, the demons of high school literally become these monsters." --Sarah Michelle Gellar
---------------

[SPOILER ALERT!] This is the Buffy-birthday, Angel turns evil, the Scoobies kill the Judge, Angel stalks Buffy and kills Jenny Calendar, Angel becomes a vampire flashback, Angel is saved and Buffy has to kill him storyline (the optional ep is where they're possessed by the ghosts of the teacher and student lovers). It's great soap opera, Harlan Ellison's "human heart in conflict with itself" definition of drama, and the arc that converted me from liking the series to being a "true fan."

Use as directed. Thank us later.

(As always, mad props to GH for passing this along and for keeping the fire burning!! And, for the record, the optional "I Only Have Eyes for You" episode is one of my personal favorites evuh.)

Linkin' You Up with Love

My boy Pimp Ninja brings the love. (He and I go back so far we knew each other before we knew each other, if you catch my drift.) Take heed, kittens, take heed. This man went out to the em-effing desert to find this truth and bring it back for you.

Dork/Dick

A sharp essay on cinema's recent embrace of the male equivalent of the virgin/whore complex: Dorks vs. Dicks (as exemplified by Ben Stiller and Jude Law).

First Ever Sports-Related Post (Kinda)

Of all the celebrities featured in Reebok's new "I Am What I Am" campaign, they ask Roddick to hide his face?

Who the hell's running that ad agency? Certainly not me or Dan Savage.

Formerly known around 1945 W. Chicago Avenue as "that tennis kid," Roddick--peeping out at me from behind his fingers on El platforms all along the length of the brown line--brightens my morning commute like no one has since that hot red haired chick in the Secret deodorant ad. (What was her secret? Something lame about putting on a fake accent when she goes to parties? So lame, so hot.)

(Image--respectfully!--borrowed from USA Today.)

It's All Right

Ted Leo chanting "it's all right, it's all right, it's all right" at the end of "Little Dawn" is one of the most profound and emotional artistic statements of 2004. Why has it gone unacknowledged? It knocks me out every time I listen to it.

¡Los Oscars del Academio!

A few brief thoughts on last night's Oscar ceremony:

* How fucking pissed would you be right now if you were Annette Bening? 'Cause it's not even like you could chalk your second loss to Hilary Swank up to sheer babe factor alone--Swank actually has mad skills. Ms. Bening is a gracious, beautiful woman, and a truly stunning actress, so I have to believe that she's taking it all in stride, but there's still a part of me that imagines her completely flipping the fuck out, much like her character from Being Julia probably would have.

* Clint Eastwood's mother?

* Charlie Kaufman's meta-commentary on his own acceptance speech ("...28...27...26...this is very intimidating...") while he was still giving it was pure genius. I couldn't be more pleased that Eternal Sunshine (which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite movies) was given even a little bit of mainstream recognition, and that Kaufman, who is one of the few auteurs worthy of the title working in Hollywood (who isn't also a director), has license to keep on following his weird, wonderful muse.

* The duet between Beyoncé and Josh Groban is the reason why I watch the Oscars. I was drunk on the giddy, cheesy glee of it all. A horrifying train wreck (no pun intended) of melisma and overemoting and Glen Ballard power balladry that delighted from start to finish.

* Chris Rock's opening monologue was, though topically tame, kind of exactly what they hired him to do. The anti-Bush stuff, calling Tobey Maguire "just a kid in tights," suggesting that Russell Crowe star in a period piece about three weeks ago--all gold. However, I do think it's telling that the biggest laugh of the night in my living room (well, the biggest laugh that didn't go to a bit of snark that one of us heckled toward the TV screen) went to Johnny Carson. I can't remember the exact wording, but his bit about "this is day 164 of the Oscar telecast," likening it to the Iran hostage crisis, really, genuinely tickled us. The joke was smart, sophisticated, and delivered with more poise than most of the jittery, fidgety, still-alive presenters could muster combined. (Jeremy Irons, delectably, excepted.)

* Why did Barbra Streisand insist on speaking to Dustin Hoffman entirely in her Mrs. Focker character for pretty much the entire time she was on stage? Though not as outright point-and-laugh-worthy as her "songs are amazing things" bon mot from the Oscars in 2003, she is definitely getting weirder by the year. And I loved Hoffman's barely concealed eye-rolling about the whole thing. There's something kind of comforting about the fact that even though he's 67 years old, he's still got more than a healthy amount of sneering, snotty, 1960s rebel attitude left in him.

O'Ds? Cassius? Benji? What am I forgetting here?

Fame!

Googled myself today (like you do) and discovered that a review I wrote way back when (uh, early 2001, I think) is linked from the IMDB, with my name prominently displayed in the link itself. Kinda sexy, huh?

In related linkage news, Brendon got a shout-out on Alex Ross's blog the other day. (It's the second oboe blog he exclaims about.)

Man, it's February in Chicago, for fuck's sake--I think I'm allowed to get excited about little triumphs like this, don't you?

Dwayne Johnson

In my ongoing effort to catalog the assortment of Things They Didn't Tell You Were Going to Happen to You as You Get Older, I'm about to list another one, for the record, here. Apparently, someone neglected to inform me that, upon turning twenty-six, you discover that you really, really love The Rock.

I've known for at least several years now that I've harbored a latent affection for the man, and even despite today's realization, I still enjoy him more as a concept than anything else (which is my roundabout way of saying I don't watch professional wrestling and haven't seen any of his movies), but there was just an undeniable amount of Rock-centric synergy this weekend.

First, the card.

The Great Benji Kelnardo gave me this card for my birthday. (Note the little bit of chocolately fingerprint on the right side. You just know some spazzed-out kid grabbed the card in the store and was waving it around screaming "The Rock! The Rock!" before his mom made him put it back. Gross, but kind of perfect.) My spontaneous, drunken reaction was one of pure glee. I was so delighted when I opened the envelope that I shrieked and laughed almost to the point of tears.

Ben, unaware the card would provoke this response (he was just banking on your average hipsterrific ironic appreciation), then played Wyclef's
It Doesn't Matter for me, which, it turns out, is like the fucking hottest song I've heard in ages. The Rock screaming "it doesn't matter!!!" every few bars only made it that much better.

Then, I finally had a chance to see the preview for Be Cool on Sunday afternoon, and later read in the just-delivered February 25th issue of Entertainment Weekly what Mr. Johnson himself had to say about his part in the film: "For me, it was an opportunity to play a role where, number one, I could be fearless and take on the challenge. . . . I thought it was cool to play someone who was not only gay but a proud gay man."

As a twenty-six year old woman, am I continuing to grow more fully into the twelve-year-old-boy part of my personality? Perhaps I'm merely more aware of it (to use the phrase M.O. and I found ourselves going back to rather frequently during other discussions over the course of this last weekend). But, gee, you know, I feel just that much better about my life today. There's a peacefulness, a calm, that comes with being able to admit that I think The Rock is just about the coolest thing in the world.

Happy Birthday to Me

I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious,
Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,
I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish,
Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again.

--Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

Life on Mars?

I'm hard-pressed to explain why I'm as excited as I (actually) am about the possibility that there may be life on Mars (link via Boing Boing). I tend not to think too much about, um, y'know, aliens and space travel and whatnot (my bipolar relationship with all things SF being what it is). But, goddamn. Life on Mars? Even if they're just little bug things living below the surface of the planet, that's some thrilling shit.

A Short Blog Post About Love

"He went on and on about his girlfriend. 'I like this girl, I think I love this girl--but I've got two kids and a wife, and there's certain obligations there. And on top of everything else, I love my wife. I'm gifted with love. I love my kids. I love all my relatives.'" --Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

Here's hoping that, in your own way, you also feel gifted with love today. (Yes, in the book these words are put in the mouth of a drugged-up, philandering traveling salesman, but, in Johnson's world, that's no reason not to honor the purity of the emotion. In fact, it may be an indication to embrace it even more fully.)

Audiofile

Let us rejoice, er, um, something, now that Tommy Bartlett has a fucking daily column at Salon, called Audiofile. Similar to Salon's other newly launched feature The Daou Report, which gives a "greatest hits" glimpse into the daily developments in the political blogosphere, Audiofile aims to provide a digest of current happenings in the online musical world by offering a daily download "followed by sporadic postings of music news, artist lists and interviews, mixes, concert reviews, and whatever else strikes my (and your) fancy."

Is it just me or does this sound like it's trying to be a one-man version of Pitchfork?

Salon's new editor-in-chief Joan Walsh says that the decision to upgrade Wednesday Morning Download to a daily feature was due to its popularity on the site. I have no doubt that WMD was extremely popular. There absolutely does need to be someone out there combing through the scads of exciting MP3 blogs with an unbiased eye and a true passion for the revolution in musical fanship that becomes possible with responsible yet unfettered access to free downloads. However, this someone is not Tommy Bartlett.

Though his youth explains a lot of the attitude problems in his writing voice (go look 'im up on Friendster--according to the limited version of his profile you're allowed to see if you're "not closely connected" to him, he's only 23), I'm still convinced that he's mostly interested in furthering his own agenda and disseminating his own snobbishly limited ideas of what is artistically valid and noteworthy in the tiny, Gotham-centric realm of his awareness/experience. This is obviously impossible to prove or quantify in any way, but I just don't feel any love emanating from his writing. I don't know how he came to be hired at Salon, and I'm sure he's happy to have achieved this much prominence as a writer at this point in his career, but his stuff always reads to me like he thinks he's, begrudgingly, doing his audience this gigantic favor by gifting us a glimpse into his superior tastes. (You don't earn the right to that kind of shitty tone until you change your name to Clinton Heylin. And even Clinton readily acknowledges in print what an ass he can be.) Many music journalist-types are cranky, to be sure, and there seems to be little point in reading music criticism if you're looking for humility, but, gosh, you know, do we really need one more young white guy who thinks so highly of himself that he can't help looking down his nose at the rest of us? Why do his columns have to come off as these withering efforts to **sigh** finally set the record straight, to provide the **sigh** definitive take on whatever is indie-as-fuck du jour, rather than as an eager and excited chance to share something fun and interesting and perhaps not yet widely known that the rest of us might get a kick out of too and if we don't oh well we're all in this together?

Sidenote: Though it would obviously be a flagrant conflict of interest to post Doveman downloads on Audiofile--despite the fact this hasn't stopped him from pimping friends and fellow musicians like Sam Amidon and Nico Muhly in the past--when is he going to get around to providing some MP3s of his band on the official Doveman site? Put your money where your mouth is, sport, for the benefit of those of us who aren't as spectacularly blessed as you are to live in NYC and therefore can't see you perform live at Tonic or Sin-E.

Really, I know this sounds like sour grapes from an equally music-minded blogger with a small (but fucking mighty! I lurv you guys!) readership, a blogger who can't (and wouldn't want to) begin to pull in the kind of numbers that Salon can, and I know I'm not saying much of anything new here about my issues with Dr. Bartlett that I didn't say during September's crusade. But, honestly, I would love nothing more than to be able to respect and support a column of this nature, even when I disagree with it. (Hello, cf the many, many links I've provided to articles and interviews on the 'Fork.) It just irks me that his ego and abrasive opining have been given a pass (especially by a site as sharp as Salon) because of the merits of the column's concept and current need it fills.

Arthur Miller

"Attention must be paid": Arthur Miller, 1915--2005.

May the master rest in peace.

Anti the Anti

I'm just letting it be known publicly that—while such things as alcoholic haikus and snarky cards and "Bittersweets" are fine for a laugh or two—I've made a conscious decision to be anti the anti–Valentine's Day bitterness this year. I'm all about the love in 2005, kittens, the love, I say!!

Kid A

Suck on it, haters: Pitchfork declares Kid A the #1 album of the first half of the '00s.

I know it's somewhat ridiculous to get excited about a pointless exercise in masturbatory indie list-making, and I know that my enthusiasm here only reconfirms my place squarely in the crosshairs of Ms. Petrusich's observation that "in certain circles, you were only as credible as your relationship to this album," but, damn, if I ain't going to go listen to it with my headphones right now and proceed to weep shimmering robotic tears onto my pillow of intergalactic ice.

The Demise

Does anyone else long for the halycon days when you could flip on the telly at random and virtually be assured of hearing the melodious, spazz-tastic sounds of "WE LUV DA SUUUUUUUBS!!!"? Apparently, yes. Slate's ad report card mourns the demise of the Quiznos Spongmonkeys.

(Rest assured, you can still see them in their original, non-corporate shilling incarnation here.)

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.)