Hot Tracks

Heads Will Roll Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Back and sassy. I haven't heard the whole album yet, but I sure like this. "Off with your head/Dance till you're dead": a killer disco-ey dance track with a great, dark electronic groove.

The Great Defector Bell X1
What a three-way between the Talking Heads, Soft Cell, and Sufjan Stevens would sound like. Orgasmic!

The Fear Lily Allen
Pop perfection + satire of the E! Network set = a fantastic song that feels like spring & summer.

Sometime Around Midnight Airborne Toxic Event
Adam from U2 likes them and recommended them on U2's recent "radio takeover" hosted by Shirley Manson of Garbage (who has become an actress. She's on that Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles show or whatever it is. Weird.) The song starts off slow but builds big, and it has this great line: "You just have to see her to know that she'll break you in two." Wow. Check them out. Listen loud.

I'm Falling Robyn Hitchcock & the Venus 3
The verses have a nice, easy feel to them, and the more rousing "Take it away" chorus is great.

What Are You Like Indigo Girls
Good, happy tune about how nice it is to have someone who knows you better than you know yourself. Aww.

Crap
Sex on Fire - Kings of Leon
I don't understand why this song is such a hit and everyone's crazy about Kings of Leon. This is one of the dumbest songs I've ever heard, and I hate how Caleb Followill sings in general. If the song were even slightly sexy, I'd feel differently, but it's just stupid, Followill's singing is irritating, the guitar during the chorus makes my skin crawl, and the lines "Your sex is on fire/Consumed with what's to transpire" make me want to never have sex again. The ironic thing is that Followill didn't even like the song when he started writing it. He thought it was "terrible," but the other guys encouraged him to keep going. Follow your gut, songwriters everywhere ...

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is a wonderful movie. It is the story of a man who begins hearing the voice of a British female narrator in his head, chronicling his life as it happens, and discovers, with the help of an eccentric literature professor, that he is the protagonist of said British author's latest, long-unfinished novel and that she intends to kill him.

Harold Crick is an IRS agent who lives a by-the-numbers existence, alone. Shortly after he begins hearing the maddening voice, he meets Ana Pascal, a nonconformist young baker he is auditing. The development of their relationship is not too sappy, not too flashy--I liked it. As he develops a desire for Ana and as he comes to know Professor Hilbert, who prompts him to examine whether his life seems to be a comedy or tragedy, Harold begins a quest to make his life worth living. Again, this is done in a way that is not too flashy, not too sappy.

Meanwhile, Karen Eiffel, the chain-smoking, down-on-her-luck author steering Harold's life, does not know that Harold is real. Until she learns this, her struggle is simply to come up with a way to kill Harold in a fashion that her novel deserves and finally finish the thing after ten years--without abandoning her artistic principles, despite the presence of Penny, an "office assistant" sent by her publisher to help the writing process along. When Karen meets Harold, the question of how the story should end takes on a very new meaning.

Will Ferrell gives a perfectly understated performance as Harold (yes, Will Ferrell: understated). Dustin Hoffman's portrayal of the professor is great and took me back to my college days, especially when he quoted Italo Calvino. Emma Thompson gets the job done, as always, as Karen Eiffel, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is believable as Ana, the opinionated but sweet bakery owner who hates paying (part of) her taxes. Queen Latifah is perfectly capable as Penny, Karen's publisher-assigned assistant, but I'm not sure what the point was of putting a big name in that role.

The movie is warmly entertaining throughout--nice humor, an intriguing mystery, and an exploration of life's mundaneness without getting too heavy--but its best part is the ending, which shows that life's greatness is in its seemingly small moments, not its great tragedies. The question of whether great art will triumph over real life is satisfyingly answered. Rent it!

Grade: A

Notable: it has a great soundtrack. The arrival of Spoon's "I Turn My Camera On" (from Gimme Fiction, an album I am now nearly four years late in acquiring, which is just plain silly, considering how great 2007's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is and that Gimme Fiction is supposed to be better ... I digress) was a highlight for me. The Jam was fun, too. And Will Ferrell's a pretty good singer when he's not hamming it up. Also notable: Tom Hulce's turn as an unhelpful, aging hippie therapist. WOW, he's aged.

Interesting fact: Spoon singer Britt Daniel co-wrote the movie score.

Interesting fact II: The movie was filmed entirely in Chicago, and I hadn't a clue while watching it.

No Line on the Horizon - U2

The new U2 album is not a perfect U2 album (The Joshua Tree and Boy are), but it is very good. The boys still have it, they're still experimenting (and cannibalizing), and when they really hit it on the head, there's not much better.

I'll go song-by-song here.

No Line on the Horizon - Pretty good, not great. It's fun to listen to loud. Edge stole the guitar part from himself (it's also in "The Fly" and one of the band's very best b-sides ever ever ever, "Lady with the Spinning Head"). Every artist is a cannibal, after all.

Magnificent - It is magnificent. This song is one of U2's best ever. I had been hitherto listening to it on my computer and my iPod and already loved it--today I stuck it in the living room stereo and turned it up loud, and WOW, it's a whole new animal. As soon as it started, I could not wait to (hopefully) hear it live & in-person. It fills a room; it's a beautiful thing. It's greater than the sum of its wonderful parts (incredible guitar, synths used in just the right way, fantastic vocals, perfect lyrics, and what sounds like a Middle Eastern or Asian influence), and it just keeps getting better as the song goes on, and with more listens. It fucking rocks.

Moment of Surrender - This one has a lot I like but a lot I'm not thrilled with. The beginning through the first verse is excellent; Bono's vocals are amazing and bring to mind The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby, and I love that verse's lyrics; but the chorus leaves me flat.

Unknown Caller - One of my favorites from the album. It took a few tries, but it's now solidly in the good (great?) category. Again, loud listening on the stereo helped me really hear how all its parts go together. The chanting (sounds like Brian Eno and/or Daniel Lanois are in there with Bono, or maybe it's the band, or all of them together) and technologically themed lyrics became unexpectedly spiritual when listening that way, and when the organ slides in at 4:25, it makes you realize where you are in this song and what you're doing. I love that beat of Larry's--we've heard it before in U2, not sure what all the songs are at the moment, but it's great; and Edge allows himself a guitar solo: a good one, and a long one. He should allow this more often; guitar solos may suck often, but it sure sounds like U2 ones don't.

I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight - This song is very listenable--it's very song-ish. I don't dislike it really; it's just that I don't like it all that much. It's got that cloying refrain that reminds me of "Walk On" or something else from All That You Can't Leave Behind and maybe something from How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. It's okay. (I love "Walk On," but I love it as a song of encouragement and healing ... I don't think it's a great song artistically, truth be told.)

Get On Your Boots - It's a fun song. Fun vibe, fun sound, fun lyrics. "I got a submarine, you got gasoline" is particularly good; Bono singing about taking the tugboat to tuna town could never not be entertaining. The "Let me in the sound" part is not the most rousing chant they've ever had, but I'm a sucker for a rock-music-as-sex metaphor, and Bono wanting to get in the audible sound while his submarine wants to get in the watery sound is as good as any. And I like the honking sound that comes after "Hey sexy boots."

Stand Up Comedy - After a drumbeat intro that threatens to turn into "Stuck In a Moment You Can't Get Out Of" (another U2 song I really like but don't want them to make again), a "Love and Peace or Else"-style hard-ass guitar line comes in and saves its ass. But not completely. I can't figure out exactly what keeps this song from really working for me. It goes into a bit of a funk thing during the verses and then morphs into an Achtung Baby or ATYCLB-style bit leading up to the "Stand up for your love" chorus, and I don't like how that all goes together. I also think "Stand up for your love" is a little bit lame as a line. I may not have listened closely to it enough yet, but it seems to me Bono wrote a bunch of lyrics in a notebook, figured out what song to put them in, and then tacked "Stand up for your love" onto it as a "can't argue with that one!" topper. There are some great bits of lyrics in there, though, not least of which are these:

The DNA lotto may have left you smart

But can you stand up to beauty, dictator of the heart

---

But while I'm getting over certainty

Stop helping God across the road like a little old lady

---

Stand up to rock stars, Napoleon is in high heels

Josephine, be careful of small men with big ideas

FEZ-Being Born - Jury's still out on this one. I've wished for awhile that they would get back to some of the experimental type of stuff they did on The Unforgettable Fire, but I'm not sure this is what I was wishing for.

White as Snow - Very good. Excellent lyrics, music that doesn't fight with them. It tells a sad story; it feels like a movie in a song. I like the lyric "If only a heart could be as white as snow." Bono gives a great vocal performance in the last verse.

Breathe - Another of my favorites from the album. I love how Bono spits out the lines, and the music rocks. If their performance of this on Letterman is any indication, this will be another great one on tour. I really like the lyrics to this one, also. And the last bit, from "We are people borne of sound" to the end, is rousing, invigorating--it just makes you feel good, makes you feel right. I think the background singing in that section turns Bono's part into a gospel solo. And when he sings, "Sing your heart out, sing my heart out," wow. Suddenly the boy/man of the first five albums is back. It's incredible when you suddenly realize he sounds the same, because overall, I usually think his voice has changed. I think it's mainly the delivery. Listen closely to that line and you'll fall into a time machine.

Cedars of Lebanon - Jury's still out on this one, too. Bono's delivery and the way it's mixed sound similar to a couple other near-end-of-album songs they've done--"If You Wear That Velvet Dress" comes to mind--and I've never been real fond of them. Very interesting lyric about enemies:

Choose your enemies carefully 'cause they will define you

Make them interesting 'cause in some ways they will mind you.

They're not there in the beginning but when your story ends

Gonna last with you longer than your friends.

Grade: A-

Tristan + Isolde

Last night I finally watched my sister's copy of Kevin Reynolds's 2005 take on the old legend in which star-crossed lovers find themselves in a royal love triangle and therefore screwed.

This legend influenced a later legend, of course--that of Guinevere and Lancelot in King Arthur's court. The studio used Romeo & Juliet as the comparison point in the trailer and advertisements. So you get the gist: two people find love and because of various obstacles and obligations they did not create and cannot in good conscience avoid, they must resist their passion for each other or only get busy in secret.

The movie draws on the super-old Celtic roots of the story for its setting and plot. Kudos to the screenwriter, Dean Georgaris, for piecing together a coherent plot from the several complicated soap opera versions of legend, which you can get a taste of here; not only is the movie understandable, but it cuts out the dragons and other fantasy bits; I liked the historical feel, like it could have been a (Hollywood-ized) true story.

The look of the movie is swell; the acting is good; it's got lots of swords and arrows, which my husband liked; neither Tristan nor Isolde is annoying (for the most part); and you really want them to get together. I also really liked Bronagh Gallagher as Isolde's maid (since childhood--Isolde is the Irish princess) and Rufus Sewell as Lord/King Marke, who raises Tristan after his parents are killed, makes Tristan his right-hand man, and winds up marrying Isolde to form a shaky truce with Ireland, not knowing that his boy Tristan is in love with her and already knew her in the biblical sense while he (Tristan) was supposedly dead.

Here are our lovers:Sorry, that's from Wagner's opera. Instead, we've gotta look at these dogs:

James Franco and Sophia Myles

Grade: A

A point of interest: It does not hurt this movie in the slightest that James Franco is real yummy and spends a quality amount of time shirtless.

The War Zone

This movie was hailed by critics and a favorite at the major film festivals, but to me it was icky and made me want to walk out in front of a speeding bus. And I can do bleak. And I'm interested in the issue of incest! But ... ick.

Sixteen-year-old Tom discovers that his eighteen-year-old sister Jessie has been having sex with their father, then struggles with what to do with that knowledge.

The first shots of Tom, where he's seen riding his bike on a winding path to his family's new home near the seaside in Devon (where they have recently moved from London) are fun to watch. Enjoy them, because everything in the rest of the movie is disturbing and miserable.

Every shot inside the house is claustrophobic. It is always dark. It is always cluttered. The wallpaper in Tom's room is enough to make you go completely Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Not long after the movie starts, Tom and Jessie's pregnant mother goes into labor. While the family speeds to the hospital with Mum screaming in pain and Dad yelling at the teenage kids, the car goes off the road and rolls over (everyone, including the baby, comes out fine)--an odd event that is supposed to be symbolic of the family's coming destruction, but all you truly needed for foreshadowing was that wallpaper. Meanwhile, every shot of the coast is bleak and threatening.

On top of all that, for the first third of the movie, Tom, the character we are supposed to identify with, is the person in the family that I liked least. For the second third, pretty much everyone, save Mum and baby Alice, was unlikeable. Interestingly (before it becomes clear what he is doing to Jessie) the father is an unsettling mix of asshole and likeable and respectable man. In the end, I finally came around to liking young Tom, once he finally (sort of) told his mother something was going on. At this point, Jessie also became a sympathetic character.

One of the things that turned me off most is the continual inappropriate nudity and sexual undercurrents in this family. Mum sits at a table with her breast hanging out of her zip-up breastfeeding bra looking right at Tom, who is staring at her. Dad gets out of bed in the middle of the night to answer the phone completely nude, walking past Tom. Tom stops and stares in at his bra & underwear-clad mother through the open bedroom door, and she thinks nothing of it. Jessie bursts into the bathroom while Tom is on the toilet and yanks a magazine out of his hand. Jessie is topless or nude half the times Tom talks (or wrestles/fights) with her, and neither of them seems to think this is strange. Apparently there is a point to this in the novel on which the film is based. But in the film it just feels pointlessly gross. Perhaps this is because the nudity is not implied; it is laid out plain for the camera. Meanwhile, Jessie seems obsessed with sex (a symptom of abuse, I know, but it feels odd here, for reasons I'll cover in the next paragraph), and the second time that Tom observes a sexual act between Jessie and their father, he watches the entire thing (as do we: the whole thing is presented in all its disturbingness, with the victim's body plain for us to see). Tom and Jessie's relationship increasingly takes on a sexual charge. The whole family has a disturbing sexual cloud hanging over it, and, unfortunately, no one--no one--goes untouched, as becomes clear when the baby winds up in the hospital.

The things about the film that are most problematic to me have to do with Jessie's abuse. It seems to me that War Zone novelist and screenwriter Alexander Stuart and director Tim Roth didn't know, or didn't agree on, exactly what direction they wanted to go. I have not read the novel, but according to synopses and reviews I've read, Jessie instigates the sexual relationship with her father. She also ends up having sex with Tom in the novel. When I watched the film, I indeed got the impression early on that Jessie had started the relationship with their father and that she wanted Tom to simply leave them alone. But during the sex abuse scene between Jessie and their father, things become confusing. Her body language is that of a passive participant; a victim. But if I'm hearing her correctly, she asks why he won't have sex with her like he does with her mother: vaginally. She sounds like she wants to have vaginal sex with him. He takes her anally, painfully. She cries. She looks horrified by the situation; this is a scene of sexual abuse. But I'm oddly left with this question: would she feel abused if he'd had sex with her the way she wanted??

Ultimately, she is a victim either way, and he is a perpetrator either way. But I'm trying to understand her motivation, and I'm trying to understand what this film is trying to tell me. The DVD has text extras that say this film was made to bring incest out into the open and help its victims; and information, guidance, and resources for victims of sexual abuse are provided. In the director's commentary (of which I watched chunks, not all), Tim Roth speaks of the film like it is a straight exposure of the horror of incest and what it does to its victims. But this isn't simply a story of a daughter terrorized by her father. Or is it? At the end of the movie, and in the presentation of the movie, apparently the makers of the movie want it to be. But that's not all that's going on with Jessie. My point is not that it wasn't sexual abuse, or that it wasn't horrible and wrong. It is that, according to the novel, Jessie was disturbed before sex with her father even started. This is implied in scattered comments in the movie, but in the end, the movie doesn't seem to want to go that way. Because of that, even apart from it just being an unenjoyable movie to watch (and not because of the subject matter), I think it fails. Why was Jessie disturbed? Why is everyone naked all the time? Why did the mother believe immediately that her husband shouldn't be trusted, when Tom gave her pretty much nothing to go by concerning why? This is not a seemingly loving family gone wrong, in my impression; this is a wacked-out family finally disintegrating.

Having said that, Tilda Swinton and Ray Winstone are excellent as the parents. Lara Belmont does an amazing job as Jessie, especially considering this was her first acting job. The casting is excellent from a physical perspective also: Jessie looks like a perfect younger version of her mother, which, of course, adds to the creepiness of the crime at hand. Freddie Cunliffe as Tom ... this was his first acting job, too. Considering that, he is impressive. But overall I found him annoying and, to tell the truth, creepy.

One other thing I will say for the film: the setting and composition of the brutal sex abuse scene are genius. It's in an old stone structure on the coast, with slits for "windows." Tom watches through a vertical one, looking in at the events, while two horizontal rectangles with sky behind them watch back like eyes. They watch the proceedings while Tom does; the event is on display. We are all seeing the horribleness of this man, their father, in all his disgustingness, fucking his own daughter while she cries in physical and emotional pain and psychological horror.

My main problem is that there just seems to be absolutely nothing edifying in this film. I just watched a clip on YouTube in which Roger Ebert talks about how incredibly happy this family is before the shocking secret tears them apart. Happy? Where was the happy? Where was I for the happy family?

And the ending ... "What are we gonna do now?" Tim Roth says it's meant to show there are no easy solutions to this abuse. People are left wounded, scarred, floundering in its wake. But other victims could, hopefully, seek out and get the help they needed. While it was satisfying to see their father murdered, what can possibly be next for Tom besides prison? Fantastic ...

Grade: C-

Hiroshima Mon Amour

This 1959 film by Alain Resnais sets an intense tryst between a Japanese man and a French woman against the backdrop of the bombing of Hiroshima—or, rather, the memory of it. I had never heard of the film before it popped up as a suggestion on Netflix after I rented Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, so I went into it knowing nothing about it but the summarized plot on the envelope.

I’m glad I knew nothing of it before, because part of the power of the film, for me, was the style of the story’s unfolding. The unnamed protagonist, played by the incredibly stunning Emmanuelle Riva, reveals a piece of her past to her new and passionate lover, also nameless in the film, played by Eiji Okada, taking the film and the viewer in an unexpected direction. Her story of pain and loss mirrors her lover’s story, which he never truly tells, that of Hiroshima’s pain and loss, but which everyone already knows—or which everyone believes they know. The reason he does not tell Hiroshima’s story is that he was not there when his city was bombed. His family was, but he cannot know the trauma firsthand. However, he becomes the prompt for his lover’s narrative: he is the frame for the real story in the film, and he plays an integral role in the telling.

The film is beautifully shot, poetically spoken (entirely in French, but that’s not why it’s poetic), wonderfully scored, and, in my opinion, brilliantly acted. (Especially considering this is Riva's first film. Her performance does suffer at moments from the odd suddenly delivered line accompanied by a dive into her co-star’s arms, which seems to happen in every movie containing an actress right up until say … 1970, but it’s rare here and forgivable.) I had never heard of Emmanuelle Riva before this film, and she is quite a find. Her light moments in the first section of the film belie her darkness and intensity later. We know early on that there is more to this woman than meets the eye, but her initial attempts to keep her lover—and us—out of her head do not quite prepare us for the darkness of the memories she holds within. Throughout the film she is a surprise—to everyone, seemingly, except for the stranger with whom she has spent the night, who seems to already know her tale.

The central themes of the film are remembering and forgetting. Which is worse: the pain of remembering or the horror of forgetting? The film relies on metaphor and is built on the duality of absence and presence. A story told can never be a story lived; is a listener(reader)(viewer) less important than the storyteller? One cannot be without the other. Can one person represent the pain of a nation, a race, a gender? Can one person encompass an era—a time and place? Perhaps not for the whole world, but for one other person. But only if one’s story is listened to closely; as Riva says early in the film, one must learn to look at things closely. Can the telling of a story exorcise one from the power of the memories it contains? It is ironic (or perhaps not) that the woman’s hometown is the French town of Nevers. She can never forget her loss, despite her attempt to shut it away, and she will never remember all that she wishes she could remember, not in the way she knew her joy when it was happening. In a way, her struggle has always been a fight against the progression of time.

This is the kind of film where every shot means something, and every line means something. Aesthetically, it is gorgeous. Each frame’s composition is striking, and the starkness of the black-and-white fits the mood, the themes, and the bleak backdrop woven from war, destruction, and uneasiness about the future. The dialogue, which occurs only between these two characters throughout the whole film, is graceful and spare. Repetition is used effectively in writing, image, and music. And the story makes one think and think some more. The whole thing is constructed wonderfully.

Grade: A+. I loved it.

Interesting fact: Eiji Okada learned his lines phonetically for the movie. An incredible feat.