David Lynch Loves Coffee

In a brief article on the huffingtonpost website, David Lynch recently professed his obsession with coffee. Not only does he drop the fact that he drinks seven large cups of coffee each day, but he also talks about how, for him, coffee fuels the creative process. In some ways this isn't terribly surprising. Artistic types have often fallen back on drugs of some sort to bring out their creativity. The recently passed away Christopher Hitchens endorsed alcohol as a means of easing the writing process, and there are no shortage of musicians from the 1960s that professed that one drug of another inspired their music. Besides, the British Empire pretty much ran on caffeine from coffee and tea to keep their soldiers alert and productive as well as cigarettes to suppress their appetite.

The article did get me thinking about Lynch as an auteur. As he mentions in his article, coffee plays an integral part of several of Lynch's works, most notably Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive. Part of the appeal of David Lynch as an artist is that when we go to see his films, we also feel as if we are seeing David Lynch himself splattered up on screen in all his messy glory. There are few directors, and even fewer American directors, who can conceivable be defined as true auteurs. That is, directors who, according to auteur theory, break through the studio system to provide a truly personal, idiosyncratic vision.

For an auteur to last long in the public eye, the individual director must be as intriguing as his or her films. Lynch's long list of serial obsessions allows him to keep his audience on their toes. What's more, there's probably as much an audience for Lynch the man as there is for his actual movies. It's because of his shifting, inscrutable nature that people haven't gotten bored of Lynch. It has allowed him to move in and out of making films, giving him time to profess his belief in meditation, record a pop album, and create his own blend of coffee, of course. And yet in interviews and articles it's hard to know whether Lynch is an actual person or merely a blend of idiosyncrasies. After all, who can really be that weird? It's hard to tell where Lynch the man ends and Lynch the trickster carnival barker begins. He's as much Alfred Hitchock in his self-promotion as he is Andy Kaufman in his ambiguity.

Like many, I have a special spot in my heart for the old man with the crazy white hair. So, here's the great espresso scene from Mulholland Drive. Please enjoy it with a find cup of joe.

The Adventures of Tintin

The Adventures of Tintin (3.5/5)

Stephen Spielberg released The Adventures of Tintin nearly simultaneously with his other film, War Horse. The two are strike an interesting contrast with each other. Where War Horse plays the role of the classic Hollywood epic, Tintin serves as its hyperactive younger brother. Most in the Anglophone world are, at best, nominally familiar with the strangely coifed titular character, Tintin, but he’s a pretty big deal among the Francophone part of the globe. My history with the character is modest, having only watched a short lived animated version on Nickelodeon when I was a kid. So I’m familiar with some of the characters, but I couldn’t tell you how the movie stacks up to the source material. But the film itself is rather unruly, at times providing exciting action but also failing to tell a fully engaging story.

Tintin is a boy reporter (his age is somewhat ambiguous) who has a penchant for discovering vast plots that require quite a bit of globetrotting to uncover. The film opens with Tintin buying an old model ship, a replica of the lost galleon The Unicorn, at a flea market. He snatches it up mere moments before another buyer, Mr. Sakharine, arrives to pick up the ship. Tintin rebuffs any offer from Sakharine to purchase the MacGuffin, er, ship, from Tintin at a sizeable profit. Needless to say, the model ship is more than it first appears, and in fact it comprises part of a series of clues that lead to a long ago lost treasure. Sakharine doesn’t take Tintin’s refusal to sell kindly, ransacking the intrepid hero’s apartment and eventually kidnapping him and storing him on a large steamship. The ship’s captain, Captain Haddock, has been deposed by Sakharine and the mutinous crew. Tintin and Haddock team up to stop Sakharine and discover the secret behind the fate of the Unicorn and its treasure, a secret that has familial ties to Haddock himself, since it was his grandfather who captained the Unicorn before it became lost at sea.

Perhaps more so than Tintin himself, Haddock seems to be the fan favorite character. He’s a bit of a drunken buffoon, and while I would imagine he wouldn’t be the ideal partner for world wide adventuring, he’s great fun to watch. Tintin was filmed using motion capture techniques, similar to the ones used in those Robert Zemeckis films, Beowulf and The Polar Express. This isn’t my favorite kind of animation because, as others have noted, the combination of animated characters and eerily realistic movement tends to produce an uncanny valley effect. However, this technique does allow Andy Serkis to put in an enjoyably cartoonish performance in the role of Haddock. Serkis has become the go to man for motion capture performances—he’s kind of a 21^st century Lon Chaney—and his robust performance is a highlight of the film. He plays Haddock as a perpetually energetic man who has little control over his own drinking, downing bottles of liquor before he has a chance to even think about it. To his credit, Spielberg keeps all of the now risqué drunkard jokes, refusing to pander to his audience. And while Haddock’s alcoholism is often played for laughs, he’s also chastised once or twice by Tintin, even if he never gives up the drink.

Much of the film is an excuse for Spielberg to deliver one fantastic action piece after another without regard to pesky things like the laws of physics. There are some fantastic moments, including a battle between two ships during a raging storm and a crash landing in the desert. But perhaps the most thrilling part of the film is a chase through a Middle Eastern bizarre that takes place in a single, long shot. In these moments we see Spielberg eager to play with animation in ways that he can’t in live action. Unfortunately, it’s in the moments between the action that the movie seems unsure of itself. Like a jittery kid on a sugar rush, the movie can hardly sit still for a moment. The film is a series of action set pieces strung together with exposition as epoxy. This means that when the adventure should feel exciting, it sometimes feels exhausting. (I did see the movie in 3D, which may have only exacerbated this problem). This seems to be a problem that’s worse in animated films. With the exception of Pixar, most animation studios feel the need to barrage the viewer with constant noise and unending movement, like they’re shaking a pair of toy keys in front of a baby. Filmmakers need to let these films breath, to find a natural rhythm. Unfortunately, Tintin is no exception to this rule.

The director and film theorist, Sergei Eisenstein wrote extensively about the concept of dialectic, the synthesis of two seemingly opposing elements. We see this in plenty of Eisenstein’s films and, strictly from the point of view of entertainment, the audience is wrenched from one emotional state to another. In his most famous film, Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein precedes the massacre on the Odessa steps with images of celebration of the arrival of the rebellious crew of the Potemkin. The contrast between celebratory citizens and the gory images of innocents being gunned down makes the film that much more compelling. Likewise, an action film, at the very least, needs moments of calm in order to further elevate the moments of gunplay and fisticuffs. Spielberg has done wonders with this kind of contrast in other films. The famous caravan chase in Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, comes after a grueling and atmospheric descent into the Well of Souls. It’s only because we have followed Indiana Jones through a pit of snakes that we are now ready to release all that built up tension by watching him slug some Nazis. These days Spielberg almost always excels when it comes to laying out the action, but he would be well served to pay as much attention to the part of the film where bullets aren’t whizzing by.

The Black Keys - El Camino

The Black Keys – El Camino (4.5/5)

The commercial success of the Black Keys’s previous album, Brothers, came out of nowhere for a number of reasons. First, as a blues-rock duo from the “flyover state” of Ohio, the Black Keys hardly seemed destined for the Billboard charts. Second, the Black Keys had been laboring diligently in indie-world for so long that for most it seemed impossible that they would finally break out of those cloistered confines of thick rimed glasses and absurdist facial hair and into a broad audience. And, finally, Brothers served as an intriguing departure from the Black Keys’s usual sound, which normally consisted of them playing nothing more than guitar and drums that were then recorded in what sounded like a tin can. Instead, Brothers took cues from hip-hop production and included plenty of stylistic detours, including vocalist, Dan Auerbach, singing in a falsetto. Perhaps the success of Brothers shouldn’t have seemed like such a fluke. After all, years of listening to the songs of the Black Keys in credit card commercials may have softened up America to their sound, and as much as the production on Brothers seemed out of step from some of their earlier albums, the further emphasis on drums and bass is hardly a losing proposition on commercial radio.

So, if Brothers seemed like an unexpected win for the duo of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, then the follow up album, El Camino, seems desperate to argue that their time in the spotlight isn’t over. Where Brothers was an expansive trip through many of the Black Keys’s outer stylistic influences, El Camino is a tightly structured album designed to deliver one pop thrill after another. The first salvo of songs, “Lonely Boy,” “Dead and Gone” and “Gold on the Ceiling,” prove to be an apt mission statement for the album. Each song is catchier than the last and impossibly danceable. The entire album attempts to keep up this high wire act, placing one potential single after another, and at times it feels like listening to a “best of” compilation rather than a proper studio release. Some might miss the minimalist charms of their early work, while others might yearn for another stylistic departure like Brothers, but for those who are merely looking for a good time, you’ll find it on El Camino. Besides, there are still interesting genre amalgams, from gospel and soul derived call and response to fat glam-rock beats, and, after all, writing eleven radio ready songs is hardly an easy task.

For El Camino, the Black Keys returned to producer Dangermouse, who also helmed their 2008 album Attack & Release. Since then Attack & Release has come to be known as the red headed stepchild in the Black Keys’s oeuvre. In hindsight it’s an obvious transition album, and, even if every track isn’t successful, it now seems like a necessary move on their way to recording Brothers. I’m happy to say that Dangermouse’s flourishes are more effortlessly folded into the Black Keys sound. On Attack & Release it too often felt as if the Black Keys had written solid songs that were dragged down by extra instruments and production tricks that were haphazardly bolted on. Here, Dangermouse’s contributions seem like a natural extension of the band, a backing chorus here, an extra guitar line there, and maybe a little more bass. In fact, despite the two principle members of the Black Keys, it’s quickly becoming impossible to refer to the band as a duo. El Camino cements the Black Keys’s place as stadium ready stars, and if the album often feels like an effortless victory lap, then it’s a well deserved one.

War Horse

War Horse (5/5)

“They don’t make them like they used to”: it’s what they say about movies. But the same can be said for directors themselves. This isn’t much of a surprise. As artists age their perspectives change. We aren’t the same person from year to year, and we are certainly not the same person in our twenties that we are in our fifties and sixties, for better and for worse. And yet people often expect artists to produce work reminiscent of what they made when they first started out. In part this may be because the audience for a director’s work carries around nostalgia for when they first encountered the artists. But artists also need to change. And it hardly seems fair to hold older artists to work they produced decades ago.

Perhaps no other director has had his early work shoved in his face by rabid fans than Stephen Spielberg. Fans of Spielberg, and cinema in general, can be protective of his early work and are often fiercely territorial when it comes to Close Encounter of the Third Kind, Jaw, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark. For these cinephiles, nothing Spielberg has done since can ever measure up to his output in the 70s and 80s. And I can relate. Spielberg came on the scene as the wunderkind from nowhere who reshaped the landscape of popular filmmaking and positioned himself as America’s storyteller. How can you compete with that kind of debut? Spielberg’s answer has largely been not to even try. Since the 90s he still pumps out the perfunctory actioner now again, whether it’s a Jurassic Park film or a War of the Worlds, but Spielberg’s “entertainments,” to borrow a phrase from Graham Greene, don’t have the same heart to them as his earlier work. Where Close Encounter was about fear of adult responsibility, represented in Roy’s escape to the stars, Jurassic Park was little more than a monster movie. It happened to be a well crafted monster movie, but, like all of his latter day adventure films, it also seemed impersonal compared to his earlier output. Instead, Spielberg chose to outsource the job of keeping America entertained to other directors, serving as a producer on the Transformer movies, J.J. Abrams’s Super 8, and subsequent Jurassic Park sequels. Sure, he puts on his entertainer cap every now and then, but increasingly he seems to do so only to prove that he can still craft a better action sequence than most directors half his age.

As Spielberg’s career progressed, he became restless. No longer content with entertaining America, he started to make “important” films, films that won awards, films that told the world he was more than just an entertainer; he was an artist. But I’ll tell you a secret about Spielberg’s attempts to be taken seriously: these movies are as good, if not better, than his early output. For the past twenty years Spielberg has attempted to balance his need to entertain, to be loved, with his need to be accepted into the club of filmmaking greats. One might point to Schindler’s List as the obvious transition point between the two sides of Spielberg, but he had been building up to his dramatic opus and Oscar winner with Empire of the Sun and The Color Purple. The lazy critique against Spielberg is that he delves too often into sentimentalism, and while this may be true on occasion, times when his need to please a large swath of the America public is at odds with the story he is attempting to tell, on the whole Spielberg’s penchant for sentimentality is exaggerated. A.I., Schindler’s List and Catch Me If You Can, among others, take us to some rather dark places.

So just as Spielberg released both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List in the year of our lord, 1993, so too has he released The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse within a few weeks of each other in 2011. To quote another film, perhaps he is “trying to suggest something about the duality of man,” and that man is Spielberg himself. War Horse is destined to become an essential entry into Spielberg’s oeuvre, a sumptuous piece of filmmaking that forms part of a conversation between Spielberg and the epics from Hollywood’s golden age. If the film has a central protagonist, then it is Joey, the stallion who makes his way from pastoral England to the war torn continent. As the film begins, Ted Narracott, a well meaning drunkard, is searching for a suitable horse to plow an arid but rock filled plot of land. He travels into town with the intention of bidding on a solid work horse, but a little too much drink and a betting match between Ted and his seedy landlord leads him to buy a young stallion, a horse that, as his friends note, is completely unsuitable for the grueling work of plowing a field.

When Ted returns home to his wife, she, quite understandably, becomes upset and tells her husband he will have to return the horse immediately. Ted’s son, Albert, becomes taken with the horse and convinces his parents that he will be able to train the horse to take a harness and pull a plow. As Albert trains his horse, Joey, the two of them form a bond. Spielberg gets plenty of drama out of the nearly wordless communication necessary to teach Joey to eat out of a bucket, to stay or come on command, or to remain still as Albert fits a harness over his head. Of course, Spielberg has a distinct knack for communicating sans words. My guess is that if one were to watch War Horse with the sound off, it wouldn’t take much to follow the ups and downs of the story. Albert does manage to get Joey to plow the once useless plot, if only after the ground has been softened by the English rain. But this doesn’t end the hardships of the Narracotts. Shortly after planting their crops, a thunderstorm upends their crops, and Ted must find some way to make the rent. World War I has just broken out, and he decides to lease Joey to the English army. Joey will be returned, if he survives.

From here, Joey makes his way from owner to owner, crisscrossing a war ravaged Europe. He begins in the care of an English officer, but ends up in the hands of two underage German brothers, a young French girl and her grandfather, and a German caretaker. For a film that borrows so heavily from traditional Hollywood cinema, War Horse has a plenty of experimental elements. And while Joey serves as a constant, each new set of characters he encounters function as a kind of vignette, as if Spielberg had connected several short films into a full length. These vignettes allow the film to get away from the protagonist versus antagonist narrative found in most war films. Because Joey traverses borders, our sympathies lie not with nation-states, the English versus the Germans, but with individual characters. If there is a villain in the film, then it is the war itself. This structure seems especially suited to WWI, perhaps one of the most singularly idiotic wars ever waged.

Spielberg is borrowing heavily from the epics of the mid-twentieth century. There’s plenty of John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Mikhail Kalatozishvili, David Lean, and early Stanley Kubrick in the DNA of War Horse. He takes from these artists a painter’s sense of how to fill up a canvas. Here Spielberg is painting every little corner of the screen, to the extent where seeing the film in your living room is a completely different experience from viewing the film on the big screen. Perhaps one of the most interesting choices in the film is the decision to obscure most of the violence when portraying one of the world’s goriest wars. This is an especially intriguing decision when you consider that Spielberg taught an entire generation how to recreate military violence in Saving Private Ryan. And yet, just as many people were enraptured by Ryan’s violence as were repulsed. One particular scene in War Horse is arguably a more effective representation of violence than all of Ryan’s gobs of blood. In what is most likely a scene influenced by Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Spielberg cuts back and forth between images of English cavalry charging, German machine guns firing, and a slew of riderless horses. The audience can easily fill in what occurs between each cut, perhaps more effectively than any filmmaker could.

In War Horse we have a perfect coalition between Spielberg the craftsman and Spielberg the student of film. Watching War Horse it becomes evident why the 1970s were the golden years of American cinema. These directors were formally trained in film school where they were introduced to criticism that dissected the classics. These directors didn’t watch movies; they studied them. And yet the movie isn’t just fodder for film buffs to pick apart. Any casual fan of Spielberg’s work will find plenty of affecting moments in War Horse. I saw the film over the holidays with my family, and at the conclusion of the movie, my mother turned to me and, rebuffing common assumptions, said, “He made it like they used to.” She’s absolutely right, in a way. This is a film that looks to the past for inspiration, but at the same time it cannot be mistaken for the work of anyone other than Spielberg himself.

Super 8

Super 8 (4/5)

Super 8 is a love story. No, not a love story between the characters (sure, there’s a little bit of that kissy stuff), but a love story between director J.J. Abrams and Stephen Spielberg. It is obvious from Abrams’s films that, like plenty of children who grew up in 70s and 80s, he was raised on the work of Spielberg and Lucas. In fact, his Star Trek preboot arguably has more in common with the work of Lucas and Spielberg than with the original series. Fashioning himself as something of a protégé, Abrams has created a wonderful little homage to his mentor.

The film opens with the off screen death of Joe Lamb’s mother who worked at the local steel mill. Both Joe and his father, Jackson, a deputy in the local police department, must deal with the emotional trauma that naturally comes from losing a loved one. At the same time, the death also strains the relationship between Joe and Jackson. Jackson just doesn’t seem to know how to raise his son without his wife around, and he wants to ship him off to a baseball camp for the summer in the hopes that it will give him some space and stifle Joe’s interest in filmmaking. Joe has been serving as the special effects and make-up artist on his friends’ movie about, what else, zombies.

The kids’ zombie movie is arguably the most important aspect of Super 8. The gang’s film represents the transformation of their playacting into an art form, a transition from childhood into adulthood that still manages to bridge these two conditions. The film further embodies the split between the world of adults and children. In many of Spielberg’s early films, especially E.T., the difference between how children and adults see the world is represented in esoteric knowledge. The fact that the wonderful and strange actually exists can only first be perceived by an innocent youth. But it is also by making this film that the boys come into contact with the fairer sex. The director, Charles, has managed to get a girl, Alice, to agree to play the part of the hero’s wife. Joe happens to have an unrequited crush on Alice, and later in the film he gets to play the daring hero to her damsel in distress when Alice is in danger.

Oh, and there’s also a giant space alien in the film that’s trying to get off this planet while wreaking havoc on the towns folk. The alien arrives in town by way of a derailed freight train. The only witnesses to the train disaster are Joe and his gang who have set up next to the tracks in hopes of incorporating the train into their film so that it will lend it some verisimilitude. The train derailment and the gang’s escape is one of the finer set pieces of the film, and it is somewhat reminiscent of the plane crash in what is arguably Abrams’s finest directorial effort, the pilot to the TV show Lost. In all, the alien seems like something of an afterthought. While Abrams does a commendable job of laying down some carefully constructed chaos, the alien himself seems somewhat perfunctory. Unlike in E.T. (a movie that I cannot help comparing Super 8 to, even if a little unfairly), where E.T. served as a companion to a child of a single parent household who struggled to connect to other children of his own age, Super 8’s monster seems like generic threat #5, seemingly picked out of a hat at random. The alien menace and the drama of loss and adulthood never come together fully. And while it is often enjoyable watching people escape or be eaten by the monster, I couldn’t help but want to get back to the gang making their movie.

But as homage the film does plenty right. In the 80s Spielberg placed films he produced and directed in small town suburbia, often in the Pacific Northwest. Likewise, Abrams’s Super 8 takes place in a small town in Southwest Ohio. We can tell the movie takes place in the late seventies because the local steel mill has yet to close down. I also grew up in a small Ohio town, and while we didn’t have a steel mill (maple syrup was a large part of the local economy), the setting did make me a little wistful for small town life. One of the great messages that come out of Spielberg’s early work as a director and producer, whether it is E.T. or Goonies, is that you need not leave your town to look for adventure. The unusual, the exciting can be uncovered in your neighbors yard, the boarded up house down the street, or the local patch of woods. The paradoxically infinite confines of suburbia were so full of excitement that leaving that world seemed unnecessary.

And in this sense, Abrams does a fine job of mimicking Spielberg. He may not have all of the details right, but he has done his homework, and the result is an entertaining summer blockbuster. In a world full of sequels and prequels, we need more movies like Super 8. Abrams may fall into the cliché of the prodigy piano player carefully reconstructing a classic; he can play the notes but he misses the soul of the music. But then again, the music was pretty great to begin with.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop (2/5)

In the second late night wars of 2010 it was easy to side with Conan O’Brien over Jay Leno. Conan was the upstart, the underdog, who pushed his craft in order to create a unique brand of humor that owed plenty to early Saturday Night Live as well as David Letterman, but still refused to be shackled by his influences. He was also, unlike Jay Leno, funny. If you have choice between a comedian who makes you laugh and one who doesn’t, then it’s not much of a choice is it? So the documentary, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, which follows Conan on the live tour he assembled following his departure from NBC, has plenty of material to work with. The movie should have been an easy win. And yet, the documentary ends up being an unfocused piece of work that can’t pick a single narrative strain to follow, or even to competently present the few moments of insight it manages to stumble across.

For some it might be a little shocking to see Conan O’Brien outside of his “Conan O’Brien” persona. Any performer on stage or screen is acting, even if that actor happens to be playing his or herself. Conan has fashioned a great character over the years. He plays himself as an anxious bundle of nerves who is at times naïve, geeky, lascivious, and flummoxed. Certainly the “real” Conan is in there somewhere, but when we tune in every night we’re watching a performance, not the Conan O’Brien who sits on his couch to kill a Sunday morning. But in Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop, the person behind the persona can be funny, kind, cutting, vain, and somewhat bitchy. If the only version of Conan you want in your mind is the one who shows up on weeknights to tell jokes, then I would recommend skipping this film altogether. I’m sure plenty of people don’t need to watch Conan O’Brien complain that his assistant fetched him food with too much butter, because he is, after all, watching his weight.

But for those who don’t mind seeing the man behind the curtain, the film has some passing moments of insight, even if they mostly go unfulfilled. At one point Conan explains that he has a habit of telling “jokes” to his staff that are in actuality critiques of their work. There’s an unspoken bargain struck between Conan and those working for him where he undercuts his complaints with humor but they understand that he does in fact want them to step up their game. These tense exchanges make sense. After all, Conan and his writers have been responsible for putting on a show five times a night for most of the year. That sort of output requires discipline, and you cannot fault Conan for applying pressure on his writers and himself. But even if we receive a few insights into Conan’s process, the film never follows up on it. He is never asked who his major influences are, how he came to comedy, how performing late night differs from writing for others.

This complete lack of curiosity on the part of the filmmakers makes some sense, since the film is following Conan on his The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour. Besides, Conan’s actual life seems rather run of the mill, a fact he plays on during his tour by telling his life story in the form of a Southern Blues song of hardship and pain before finally admitting to the audience that he was born to well to do parents in the affluent Boston suburb of Brookline. But the tour winds up being little more than an afterthought. The movie is less about Conan the artist than it is about this specific moment in Conan’s life. For some reason the filmmakers felt that whatever is going on back stage was much more interesting than the pyrotechnics on stage, a tragic decision. There are several moments where we get to see Conan interact with guest stars who have joined him on stage in several cities, such as John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Jim Carrey. But we don’t actually get to see Conan perform with these people. It’s as if the director thought to himself, sure, I could show a clip of Conan and Jim Carrey singing a duet, but the audience probably just wants to see the two of them complimenting each other backstage.

And this is the most frustrating aspect of Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop. We spend maybe twenty percent of the film watching footage from the tour (which is, admittedly, really funny) and about eighty percent of the film watching Conan and his entourage snap at each other as the pressures of constant touring increasingly weigh on them. The movie at times resembles a concert film, but with the percentage of music to interview is completely flipped. In another, fairer, universe, Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is the comedy equivalent of The Last Waltz, but here in our dull little world it’s nothing more than a missed opportunity.

Martha Marcy May Marlene

Martha Marcy May Marlene (5/5)

Martha Marcy May Marlene marks the debut of two talents, the director, Sean Durkin, and the actress, Elizabeth Olsen. Both actor and director show a kind of assured performance that seems relegated to those who are either new to a scene, when talent has been building up for some time and only now has had a chance to unveil itself, or to older creative types, who have enough success behind them that they no longer fear failure (the in-between is usually the tricky part). Elizabeth Olsen (and here I’m required to tell you that she is the younger sister to the famed Full House Olsen twins) plays Martha, a girl who has spent an indeterminate amount of time in a cult hidden away in upstate New York. She eventually flees the confines of the commune and is taken in by her sister and brother-in-law who own a spacious lake house in Connecticut.

From here the film is divided into two narratives, one chronicling Martha’s ordeal in the Manson-like collective and the other detailing her return to polite society at her sister’s place. We learn from the former narrative that the cult takes in runaways and is overseen by a charismatic leader, Patrick, played by John Hawkes. While the cult members bandy about pseudo-New Wave jargon, we hear talk of energies, the specific philosophy of the cult remains vague. As one might expect, Patrick has intimate access to most of the women, as do the other men on the compound, to varying degrees. The cult members share duties taking care of children and tending to a garden, and they hope one day to go fully off the grid.

The second narrative follows Martha as she attempts to reconnect with her sister Lucy and return to normalcy. For Martha, the lake house is an even more foreign world than the cult. She still plays by the rules set up for her by Patrick. She goes skinny dipping in the middle of the day. And when she feels lonely in her bedroom, she has no qualms about lying down on the foot of Lucy’s bed, even if her sister is in mid-coitus. As Martha’s actions become increasingly bizarre, her brother-in-law puts more pressure on Lucy to hand her sister over to an institution. As we learn what Martha has gone through, it becomes more and more difficult to sympathize with Lucy and her husband’s frustrations. But while Lucy’s husband, Ted, often comes off as a prick (tellingly, he has a well enunciated British accent), it is hard to blame Lucy’s reticence to take on the responsibility of handling Martha on her own.

Even though the two narratives are chronologically back to back—the story of Martha’s time in the cult followed by her time with her sister—neither is prized over the other. In fact, it is difficult for me to describe events that occur at the compound as flashbacks because for Martha these events do not exist in the past. She carries the trauma with her. Durkin, the director, excises most establishing shots from the movie, making it difficult to tell whether the next scene begins at the lake house or the compound. The title of the film is a series of names the main character goes by. Her birth name is obviously Martha. She is given the name Marcy May by Patrick when she joins the cult. And Marlene is a communal name used by all the women in the cult to answer the phone. Martha is a woman who has been stripped of her ego and exists in the liminal space between “is” and “was.”

Elizabeth Olsen does a fantastic job of portraying a woman who has undergone immense pain. While this trauma does not always manifest itself, it always lingers underneath the surface of her performance. Likewise, Durkin imbues even the most mundane scenes with a sense of tension. It is far, far too early to tell where either Olsen or Durkin’s career will go at this point, but I would be interested in seeing the two work together again. Regardless, I have a feeling plenty more will come from both of these talents.

R.E.M. - Fables of the Reconstruction

R.E.M. – Fables of the Reconstruction (5/5)

I was as shocked as anyone to learn that after thirty years of writing, recording and touring R.E.M. would finally call it quits. It’s strange to hear that a band with such a long history has broken up. It’s kind of like when a couple decides on a divorce when both partners are firmly entrenched in middle age. You have to wonder, why now? Surely R.E.M. could have gone on touring and putting out albums every five years or so, and no one would have thought less of them. Perhaps it has to do with slipping out from under the expectations that the name R.E.M. carries with it. Perhaps they don’t have anything left to say, or are finished making music (I certainly hope this isn’t the case). Like many, following R.E.M.’s breakup, I have taken the opportunity to reflect on where they stand both in my personal aural autobiography I keep running through my head and in their larger place as musicians. I would like to take a moment to highlight one of their great early records, Fables of the Reconstruction, in order to reassess the album in light of the R.E.M.’s entire oeuvre.

It may be hard to remember now but before the world tours and sold out stadiums, R.E.M. began as more of a local act. For the first part of their career they were heavily associated with the Athens music scene, and it seemed like R.E.M. couldn’t exist anywhere but in the American South. Peter Buck’s folk influence and Michael Stipe’s dark, cryptic lyrics evoked the hidden backwoods of Americana in the same manner as William Faulkner or Flannery O’Conner. Fables of the Reconstruction was, arguably, the last album by R.E.M. that still felt immersed in the Southern Gothic tradition. It might seem strange, then, that the album was recorded not in Athens, but in England. Of course, sometimes we need to leave a time and place in order to truly see it.

Fables opens with the disorienting “Feeling Gravity’s Pull.” Stipe sings of falling asleep while reading and name checks the surrealist artist Man Ray while Buck’s guitar trips its way along a stuttering melody. This signals a different direction from their previous album, Reckoning, which, while still firmly planted in Southern soil, managed to have a more outsized feel with bigger hooks and catchy choruses. Fables’s off kilter feel is mirrored in the packaging. The front cover reads, “Fables of the…” and the back cover continues, “Reconstruction of the…,” creating an endless loop.

Tellingly, the second track, where most bands would place the obvious single, is instead taken up by a down tempo tribute to outsider artist, Rev. Howard Finster, “Maps and Legends.” It is only by the time we reach “Driver 8” that the album starts to develop real momentum, thanks mostly to Bill Berry and Mike Mills’s propulsive rhythm section, which nicely mirrors the subject of the song, a train engine. Themes of movement and change run throughout the album, perhaps an early indicator that after Fables R.E.M.’s sound would also shift directions. “Driver 8” in particular speaks to the timelessness of R.E.M.’s music. By reaching back and writing about an older mode of transportation, R.E.M. projects their subject matter outside of the here and now. This is nicely mirrored in their music, which borrows just as much from 60s folk as it does from punk and new wave.

The latter two influences can be heard in some of the more energetic numbers, like “Life and How to Live it” and the at times violently atonal, “Auctioneer (Another Engine).” The most out of step song on the album is perhaps “Can’t Get There from Here,” which sounds like Public Image Limited by way of Creedence Clearwater Revival. The guitar on “Can’t Get There” sounds more like a rhythm instrument than the lead. From Stipe’s low voiced deliver to the high pitched squeal that opens the songs, “Can’t Get There” serves as a humorous one off, a respite from the pitch black Southern woods that seems to hover around the rest of the album. The song may be a sonic outlier, but thanks to its placement in the center of the album, at the moment when the listener is ready for a break, and thanks to lyrics that extend the theme of geography and insider/outsider, the album just wouldn’t work as well without “Can’t Get There from Here.”

And it’s this inconsistency made congruent that perhaps best defines the sound of R.E.M. The band is probably best known for their jangle-pop sound, and yet there isn’t a single moment in their career where this description fully encompassed the band’s identity. R.E.M. borrowed too much and had too much of their own personality to easily define. In the album’s closing song, “Wendell Gee,” Stipe sings that the title character chooses to “whistle as the wind blows,” which perhaps best defines R.E.M.’s career as artists who, while ever mercurial, never made changes that weren’t on their own terms. Fables signaled the end of R.E.M.’s early sound, and as much as I love the triptych of Murmur, Reckoning, and Fables, I’m just as pleased that they chose to follow their inspiration to wherever it took them, trusting that fans were going to follow.

Woods - Sun and Shade

Woods – Sun and Shade (5/5)

Woods have released three albums in the last three years. Surprisingly, this breakneck recording speed has had no impact on the quality of their material. Woods’s past three albums, Songs of Shame, At Echo Lake, and, their most recent, Sun and Shade are all impeccable pop albums. Each album fits a certain well worn mold that the Woods have occupied for a few years now. And even if the band prefers to tinker with their sound, making changes around the edges, rather than overhauling it from the ground up, I just can’t hold that against them since Woods always hit the bullseye, even if they barely move the target.

The sound of Woods might be reductively described as a lo-fi version of the Grateful Dead, minus the self-indulgent jamming. But what makes their sound so enduring is the way different sonic elements brush up against one another. The songs themselves are instantly catchy, yet each instrument must be heard through the bristling lo-fi recording; the band’s sound can be instantly uplifting, yet their lyrics often have a cynical lilt. Woods continue to stretch these dynamics on Sun and Shade whose first three songs, “Pushing Onlys,” “Any Other Day,” and “Be All Easy” are a musical triptych that runs the emotional gamut from nostalgic to melancholy to stirring.

After this opening salvo, Woods go into one of their winding instrumental tracks, “Out of the Eye.” At least one song on Woods’s past three albums has been an experiment in songwriting where they treat structure like putty, stretching it out until the music barely holds itself together. As if to apologize for the sheer accessibility of their last album, the impossibly catchy, At Echo Lake, here Woods have included two of these instrumentals. This changes the dynamic of the album, putting the listener on edge. The second of these instrumentals, “Sol y Sombra,” delves into percussion and atmosphere, like the soundtrack to a spaghetti Western directed by Terrence Malick.

But perhaps the most surprising change on the latest album is that on several songs lead singer Jeremy Earl drops the old timey microphone, which normally makes the vocals sound as if they are being transmitted from seventy years ago. The creaky vocals are such an instantly recognizable part of the band’s identity that I was genuinely taken aback to hear his voice sound so naked. So I suppose I don’t care if Woods don’t feel the need to drop a Sgt. Pepper like reevaluation of their sound. Their music is so haunting, so limitless that tweaking their sound is enough. Besides, even the Beatles had to record Help, Rubber Soul, and Revolver before they could tackle Sergeant Pepper.

Tune-Yards - WHOKILL

tUnE-yArDs – W H O K I L L (2.5/5)

Despite his archetypal place as a hero, no one wants to be the boy who obnoxiously points out that the emperor has no clothes. Maybe the town folks were deluding themselves by celebrating the non-existent attire, but they were also taking a little time out of their day with their family to enjoy a royal procession. And that little brat had to ruin it for everyone. So, it is with little pleasure that I have to question the universal praise of the Tune-Yards’s latest album, WHOKILL. At its best, the album strives to strike out in its own direction, but at its worse, the album seems strangely emptied of new ideas, a cardinal sin for a band that, judging by their assault on rules of capitalization, pride themselves on their ingenuity.

WHOKILL is built around two important elements: the band’s interest in afro-beat rhythms and the schizophrenic vocal stylings of lead singer Merrill Garbus. Rock musicians have been entranced by African rhythms at least since the likes of Adam and the Ants dropped their first album, so it isn’t particularly revelatory several decades down the road. Of course, all musicians build upon their forebears, so Tune-Yards do not deserve demerits merely because they aren’t the first to be influenced by African music. The band’s real problems stem from their execution. The songs themselves are built tentatively on a thin frame, treating their deliberately tinny sounding drums lead each song. This at time seem to conflict with the vocals. Garbus’s voice can hover quietly or burst into a shriek at a moment’s notice. And yet this range never becomes a true asset. Whenever she chooses to let out a full throated yalp she throws the entire affair out of order, overpowering the treacly instrumentation. There are plenty of missteps throughout WHOKILL, but none get under your fingernails as easily as the moment on “You Yes You” where Garbus screams “What’s that about!” like a cartoon character over a thin beat.

But perhaps the most unsettling aspect of WHOKILL is the sense that Garbus is performing, metaphorically, in blackface. I certainly have no inherent problem with the kind of cross cultural pollination that Tune-Yards are trading in. Without different cultures borrowing from one another, then none of my favorite musical forms would even exist. However, when a white girl begins singing in a faux patois and appears to be speaking from the perspective of an urban minority, then we should probably question whether or not she is doing more than just pantomiming for affect. Perhaps the worst offender of the entire album is the song “Gangster,” which uses the following as its chorus: “Bang bang bang oh / Ain't never move to my hood / Cause danger is crawling out the wood.” Again, I actually have no problem with whites taking on the voice of black protagonists when it serves a particular artistic or narrative end, but because Garbus’s lyrics lack any depth—she seems content to merely repeat the same snippets throughout the song—the moments where she takes on a black voice come across as nothing more than affected flourishes. The African (American) experience becomes little more than an aesthetic choice.

The Tune-Yards are currently enjoying a seemingly endless amount of praise. And even if that praise is undeserved, I certainly cannot begrudge them their success. After all, there are plenty of more financially successful musicians who make far worse music. At least Tune-Yards are trying, even though they are not also succeeding.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 (4/5)

As anyone who has ever turned the final pages and read the last words of a book knows, endings can be bittersweet. Some of my favorite novels only achieve their true power, their true resonance when they are finished. Great last lines seem to echo for a time long after we have finished reading them. And while this feeling is not absent from certain films, there is a reason why a sense of continuance is associated more with the novel than with a movie. While a movie may last, on average, two hours, it takes many hours and days to finish most novels. When reading a novel we live with the characters for a time. We get to know them, to understand their inner life, their goals and fears. Perhaps the greatest compliment that can be paid to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is that when the credits roll it feels as if I have turned the final page on a very, very long book.

The final installment in the Harry Potter series, HP 7.2 for short, feels like part of a whole not only because it follows seven other films, but because it is in fact the second half of one film. In many ways it is impossible to separate Deathly Hallows 1 and 2, but because I haven’t watched the first half since I saw it in theaters several months earlier, this review will by necessity be somewhat incomplete. My guess would be that watching both parts back to back would only enhance both films. But even when disconnected from the first half, HP 7.2 serves as a rousing, emotionally engaging film that ranks alongside some of the best installments of the series.

One of the chief complaints concerning HP 7.1 centered on the wandering section, which many (although not me) thought was amorphous and unnecessary. Those critics should be pleased to discover that part 2 stuffs plenty of action into its relatively short (for a Harry Potter movie) running time of a little over two hours. Much like its obvious inspiration Return of the Jedi, HP 7.2 functions almost entirely as a third act climax. As the movie begins Harry, Ron and Hermione are licking their wounds after their encounter with Bellatrix. They know of another Horcrux, which must be obtained and destroyed if they are to stand a chance against Voldemort, but it is unfortunately hidden in a guarded vault stuffed deep into a cave, which also happens to be owned by the Lestranges. In order to gain access to the vault Hermione uses a potion to transform herself into the very image of Bellatrix Lestrange. Ron trusses himself up as a random henchman while Harry and the Goblin Griphook, who has agreed to secret them into the vault, both hide under the trusty cloak of invisibility. Naturally, not everything goes to plan (a constant of the Potter universe that Ron happens to comment on), and, in one of the finer escapes of the series, the trio end up fleeing the vault on the back of a dragon.

From here the heroes must infiltrate Hogwarts in order to free the school from the tight fisted control of Snape. Under his guide, Hogwarts has been transformed into a kind of Voldermort’s Youth program. Borrowing from Riefenstahl by way of George Lucas, students at this new Hogwarts gravitate towards each other to form rigid geometric squares, a far cry from the chaotic hallways of yore. Upon reclaiming Hogwarts, student and teacher alike prepare for an oncoming assault from Voldemort. The final battle more or less encompasses the last half of the film, and the genre shift into a siege film is a nice change of pace, kind of an Assault on Precinct Hogwarts. The siege is deftly handled, and because most viewers are familiar with the geography of Hogwarts campus we are already aware of each ingress and egress that must be defended. This is a Harry Potter film, so there are twists that I won’t spoil, even if in all likelihood most fans have anticipated watching these surprises unfold on celluloid after reading the final book several years ago.

Perhaps the trickiest move a final film in a series must accomplish is to provide a compelling story on its own while paying homage to moments from the past. To this end, the movie shuffles in legions of creatures, locations, and items from the first six films. When Ron and Hermione revisit the chamber of secrets or when Harry makes use of the Pensieve, one can’t help but get a little nostalgic for all of the adventures these characters have shared within the seemingly boundless halls of Hogwarts, a school so vast that it has nearly house the entire Harry Potter epic. Carefully folded into the landscape, each little easter egg serves to recall adventures from a much simpler, less tortuous time in the Potter myth cycle. By trusting the audience to pick up on these signifiers of the past, HP 7.2 smartly chooses not to indulge in too much speechifying, instead choosing to let the action do the talking, this time choosing to resolve the plots of lovelorn teenagers on the go.

But the biggest surprise of the film might be the central place Neville Longbottom holds in the chaotic proceedings. Critics like to remark, with good reason, that the three main actors have grown to be surprisingly adept at their craft, inhabiting their characters with tremendous ease. What gets left out of this well worn observation is that the same can be said of Matthew Lewis who has had to bear the thankless task of portraying Neville while sporting fake teeth and at times wearing a fat suit. Lewis does a phenomenal job of portraying Neville as a once tertiary character who rises to the role of hero when time and events call on him. In many this transformation becomes the heart and soul of HP 7.2.

The fact that Longbottom could become such a highpoint of the final Harry Potter film speaks to the depths of Rowling’s creation. For her each character was the hero of his or her own story, and just because we were not always privy to these adventure did not mean they were any less important than what was happening to the big three characters. The Harry Potter series will go down as a singular achievement, a story that spans seven film and twenty hours while suggesting that even more is happening beyond the frame of the camera. It is a testament to each director that they not only understood Rowling’s vision, but that they truly understood the collaborative nature of filmmaking. A story so large deserves many authors, from each director, actor, screenwriter, Rowling herself, and every myth and legend she soaked up over the years. And even though it is sad to see the story end, the world these authors constructed seems so vast that I cannot help but think that the narrative continues for each characters long after the credits roll.