Violent Femmes - Hallowed Ground

Violent Femmes – Hallowed Ground (5/5)

There are few bands who have released debut albums as fully formed as the Violent Femmes’s eponymous release.  In the decades since its first appearance in 1983, Violent Femmes has become somewhat iconic, and the album seems to constantly spawn a new life for itself with each new generation of listeners thanks to the way in which it delves into seemingly universal themes of alienation, anxiety, and frustration (or at least universal to every wave of American teenagers from the 1950s onward).  And while it is possible to place the Violent Femmes’s sound within a historical context, mostly as a precursor to “alternative” music along with their peers R.E.M., the unique arrangement of their influences, a strange mash up of punk, folk, and jazz, has confounded any potential imitators, making their original debut sound just as energetic and new today as it did nearly thirty years ago. 

In fact, the Femmes’s debut cast such a long shadow that each subsequent released couldn’t really escape it.  The conundrum of a successful first album can be heard in the Violent Femme’s second LP, Hallowed Ground.  For a second album, plenty of bands choose to make an inferior copy of the first, often by digging up some b-sides and calling it a day.  But for Hallowed Ground the Violent Femmes delved deep into their well of influences and offered up an album that, while clearly the work of the same three musicians, subsumes plenty of unexpected genres.  The Femmes delved into country, bluegrass and folk for some eerily Christian themed songs.  The lead singer, Gordan Gano, was raised by a devout Baptist minister, and he apparently held onto his faith despite the conflicted nature of Hallowed Ground’s songs.  The other two members of the Violent Femmes, Brian Ritchie and Victor DeLorenzo, were atheists at the time the group recorded Hallowed Ground, and at first were uncomfortable with the religious nature of the second album.  The album itself is tonally conflicted, not only swerving from one genre to another, but also swinging back and forth from religious condemnation to spiritual euphoria.

In the end, Ritchi and DeLorenzo had little to fear from this batch of songs.  This is not the music of a blindly following zealot, but of a man who feels disgust for religion even as he seemingly holds it firmly to his chest.  The first track off the album, “Country Death Song,” tells a Southern Gothic style narrative of a man who murders his entire family before hanging himself in his barn.  Told from the point of view of the husband and father, the protagonist whispers religious aphorisms to his daughters before plunging them down a well, telling them “Kiss your mother good night and remember that God saves” and later, “You know your papa loves you, good children go to heaven.”  The songs often touch upon bible-black topics like death, destruction and apocalypse, a subject that would have taken on new resonance during the cold war where potential nuclear destruction seemed to linger in everyone’s thoughts.  Tellingly, several songs, like “I Hear the Rain” and “It’s Gonna Rain,” invoke the story of Noah and the flooding of the earth.  But the centerpiece of the entire album must be the title track, which brings these themes of nuclear holocaust out from subtext.  The song begins with a spoken word invocation in the style of the King James Bible and plays with such atomic imagery as “Everyone's tryin’ to decide/where to go when there’s no place to hide/I follow the bombs as they’re coming down” and “Burn up the clouds block out the sun.”  A rising and falling piano melody leads us through the track, all the way to the end where it devolves into in a three way instrumental ruckus.  In fact several songs kick up a row in their later half, a strong disagreement between guitar, bass, and drums that perhaps signifies the conflicted nature of the album itself.

But there are also genuine gospel songs on the album, freed from any winking irony or tangled doubt.  And yet Hallowed Ground still feels like a Violent Femmes album through and through.  In part that’s because the songs are still written by the same three players who made their debut album such a classic and still include Gano’s recognizable bratty vocals and a one of the greatest series of bass lines in rock in roll.  In a sense Hallowed Ground allows us to reread the Violent Femmes’s eponymous album, forcing us to take a step back and reassess the psychosexual frustration that permeated those songs.  Instead of reading the first album as the ranting of a bored and randy kid, we might instead interpret those songs as the result of a teenager whose body was telling him something completely opposed to his upbringing.  And it is this difference between nature and religion that results in the dark night of the soul style questioning in Hallowed Ground.  Ultimately it’s because Gano’s religion is sufficiently suffused with doubt that no matter what your background, from agnostic to Episcopalian, there’s plenty in these songs that should resonate.  After all, no matter one’s ideological or religious grounding, if we do not struggle with at least some misgivings, then we have given ourselves up to someone else’s beliefs, not our own.   

About that Before Watcmen announcement...

This Wednesday the comic book loving world gave a collective sigh of inevitability when DC Comics threatened us with the release of a series of prequel comics to the beloved Alan Moore comic book The Watchmen. There's not a single comic-loving individual who didn't react strongly to the idea that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's immaculate vision might be sullied at the hands of a company more interested in a quick cash grab than in the artistic legacy of one of its most heralded accomplishments. Hell, even DC Comics seem aware of the firestorm they might set off, describing the new series, Before Watchmen, as both "highly anticipated" and "controversial," as if to say, "yeah, maybe we're pissing all over Moore's work, but what are you going to do, not read the series?" This statement would then be followed by a cigar chomping executive releasing a belly-shaking laugh.

Voices across the internet have reacted in a variety of manner, and there are some obvious objections to Before Watchmen. Over at NPR they ruminated on how prequels might ruin the cultural capital that The Watchmen has built for not only itself but for comics as a medium. Others have, understandably, treated the original book as sacrosanct, suggesting that no one should ever mess with Moore's artistic vision (most notably, Moore himself falls into this latter camp). But I would like to discuss two things: first, the idea of prequels and second, the idea of artistic fidelity.

Prequels are a tricky proposition in any medium. On the one hand, we should probably be thankful that we are only getting prequels and not actual sequels to The Watchmen, which ended on a wonderfully unsettled note. But of course prequel stories come with built in problems of their own. The most obvious problem is that we already know what will happen. A great writer can use this to his or her advantage. Greek tragedies, for example, got plenty of mileage out of the fact that the audience knew things were going to end poorly for the characters on stage. But for whatever reason, from the Star Wars prequels to that Wolverine movie, prequels have been unable to take advantage the audience's prescient like knowledge. Instead, these prequels have played out like the opening of Indiana Jone and the Last Crusade, showing us where every little personality trait and quirk came from over the course of a single story.

The Watchmen is as fully realized a fantasy world as Narnia, Middle Earth, Neverland, Utopia, Oz, and even DC Comics own world of superheroes. But in order to fashion a world that seems real and lived in, you have to allow for some unknowns. The author Michael Chabon writes that when reading Tolkien, like most of us, he was always intrigued by those blank places on the map, places named but where characters never actually visited. I'm of the mind that those blank places make a fantasy world feel huge and lived in, because whatever is going on with our heroes and their quest, we know that there are a million other stories that are not being told. This is why one of my favorite details about the original Star Wars movies was the inclusion of ancillary characters like Wedge Antilles, the pilot that seemed to always be around for the major battles, but who never had more than a few lines in each film. We knew that this character must have had some incredible adventures over the course of those three films, but we also knew that we were only seeing snippets of them.

To fill in the blank areas in The Watchmen books would only make the universe seem smaller and less unruly. Besides, the original book already does a fine job of fleshing out these characters. What more do we need to know? I guess these comics could elaborate on what Ozymandias's weird bio-engineered tiger thought of his master's solution to nuclear war.

The next issue I have with Before Watchmen is a little trickier. One of the announced authors of the series, J. Michael Straczynski, notes that Moore himself built a career of appropriating the work of others, whether he was working on Swamp Thing or playing in the world of Victorian literature in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series. So what's good for the Moore is good for the Straczynski? Besides, even The Watchmen was based, in part, on characters from Charleton Comics, which DC had bought just prior to when Moore embarked on writing the Watchmen series. And even I have to admit that DC managed to wrangle some impressive talent to write this series. I'm more than a little curious about what a Rorschach series written by Brian Azzarello or a Minutemen series written by Darwyne Cooke will read like.

First, I would answer that characters like Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing (all of which Moore has worked with) were designed from the beginning to continue as long as people want to read stories about these characters. So they're a different breed than Night Owl or even Allan Quatermain and Sherlock Holmes. Just like Moore, Sir Author Conan Doyle became famously incensed when the French author and Doyle contemporary Maurice Leblanc put Holmes into one of his Arsene Lupin stories. So what's the difference between Leblanc stealing Holmes and Moore stealing Holmes? In a world where appropriation has now become established as a legitimately creative act, can we really blame the authors of Before Watchmen?

A cop out answer would be that Doyle was still around when Leblanc borrowed his creation, just as Moore is around to see his characters taken from him. Although I have decried DC's decision from the beginning, I don't necessarily think that it is unfair to borrow Moore's work. Unlike Moore himself, who famously hates on any sort of film adaptation of his work, I have always approached movies like V for Vendetta and The Watchmen with a certain amount of curiosity. Of course, none of these films have ever been successful adaptations, but that doesn't mean there will never be a successful adaptation of an Alan Moore comic. Instead, I think that the single biggest issue that will prevent a great appropriation of Moore's work is fidelity to the source material.

I know that the common reaction to any adaptation is to claim that if only the artist were faithful to the "original" vision, then maybe the end results will achieve the same kind of greatness. This was the mantra when The Watchmen movies was about to arrive. And that film was far more faithful to its source than any expected. It was also a slog and a bore. There are plenty of problems with The Watchmen film, and its slavish devotion to the source material is one of those problems. The director, Zack Snyer, who isn't a terribly smart fellow, didn't realize that what works in a comic book doesn't work on film. Conversely, Moore hasn't been terribly devoted to immaculately recreating the vision of the authors who he is taking from. Instead, he uses the work of others as a jumping off point to go in whatever direction he wants.

What scares me the most about Before Watchmen is that the original book has become so sacrosanct that the artists will do little than ape Moore and collect a paycheck. There might be someone out there who could do something interesting with The Watchmen characters, who could put their own spin on that universe. But judging from what I've seen of DC's decision, I doubt this will be the case. Maybe in fifty years or more, a young upstart will take Ozymandias, Rorschach, Night Owl and the rest and create something truly fantastic and unique with those characters. But until then, we should probably leave Moore's creation alone.

I must admit that my favorite part of any news story about an Alan Moore adaptation is the inevitable quote from Moore himself. And of course he doesn't disappoint in this regard. Reached for comment, Moore stated, “I tend to take this latest development as a kind of eager confirmation that they are still apparently dependent on ideas that I had 25 years ago.” This little jab, although wonderful in its curmudgeonly execution, isn't true exactly. Much of the comic book world has moved on from the cynical brand of deconstruction popular in the 80s and 90s. This is evident when books like Kick Ass unsuccessfully attempt to return to the well dug by artists of the 80s and 90s, and that book in particular has served as the nadir of deconstructionist trend, lacking the craftsmanship and wit found in a book like The Watchmen. Instead, some of the most interesting work in the world of comic books (specifically those of the superhero variety) have come from authors who, instead of running away from the unserious nature of comic books, have embraced the absurdist stories of the silver age. Authors like Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns have done a fine job of finally breaking away from the deathly seriousness of the 80s and 90s. Since a good deal of the comic book community has moved on from the influence of The Watchmen, it seems like an unnecessary retreat to return to that time and place. But, I suppose it could be worse. A lot worse:

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar

American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar (5/5)

“Cleveland: You’ve Got to Be Tough”: this unofficial slogan of that industrial city off the shores of Lake Erie was smattered across t-shirts in the 1970s. In the following decades a lot has changed, but the one thing that has remained constant is our perpetual underdog status. Our sports teams don’t win championships and even several decades removed from the collapse of America’s industrial engine, we’re still the butt of jokes. But that’s not to say that we don’t take pride in the city. Fully expecting to lose, every year plenty of Cleveland sports fans crowd into the Jake or the Browns Stadium. We also have our share of famous artists from the region that we like to name check from time to time, from Pulitzer Prize winner Toni Morrison to Oscar winner Trent Reznor. But perhaps no single artist better epitomizes the city than indie cartoonist Harvey Pekar.

Harvey Pekar was a lifelong resident of Cleveland. As recounted in the collection American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar, he first became interested in the medium of comic books after striking up a friendship with underground cartoonist, and occasional greeting card artist, R. Crumb. But unlike Crumb and other underground comic book artists who found their way to the one of the coasts where they found a reasonable amount of recognition, Pekar remained in Cleveland his entire life, toiling away as a file clerk in a local VA hospital while managing to pump out a series of often understated, always brilliant autobiographical comic shorts.

In some sense, Pekar is Cleveland and Cleveland is Pekar. Much like his home city, Pekar is a perpetual goat, slogging through the years and struggling to maintain a grip on himself. Most of the comics written for American Splendor: The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar were published in the 1970s and 80s, a time when the wide open possibilities found in the 60s counterculture were beginning to collapse. Likewise, Cleveland’s economy, which had once helped fuel the postwar boom, had capsized.

So we often find Pekar pontificating on the different racial factions of Cleveland and the rise to power of conservatives following civil rights. In one particularly affecting comic, Pekar relates the story of Emil, a European immigrant who worked in Cleveland’s steel mills. Emil begins his time in Cleveland as a union radical, but as white flight and economic depression take over the city, his attitudes change displaced by a racist view of the white and black culture clash of the 70s. Pekar of course sees Emil’s views on race as absurd and more than a little naïve. Emil doesn’t seem to realize the sort of racial tension that have built up in the African-American community over segregation and discrimination. But he tells Emil’s story empathetically as a missed chance for shared understanding. In a later story, “Jury Duty,” Pekar recounts his experience being chosen for everyone’s least favorite civic duty. He finds himself being co-opted by an out of control judicial system that overlooks crimes of the wealthy and powerful while judges have become increasingly draconian on the poor and powerless. Pekar decides that he cannot be a part of this out of balance system and stymies the judge and prosecution by telling them that he wouldn’t feel right determining someone’s guilt when he has no control over what punishment is dished out. In these moments his life as a sixties radical peeks through the grey of oil shortages and Reaganomics.

But Pekar isn’t normally cited for his views on large socio-economic issues. He is instead well known for looking at the quotidian aspects of life that seem to be constantly nipping at his heels. Pekar’s narratives often eschew the traditional structure of the short story, which are often comprised of three acts, a climax, and a denouement. Some of his shorter works, which are usually around a page or two, consist of mundane small talk heard on the bus or around the office. He might take on the subject of the punishingly long hours of a weekend with nothing to do where he dreads work on Monday morning but still cannot stand the lost time of the weekend. Mundane trips to the grocery store or helping a friend move can sometimes transform into a meditation on art and commerce or an existentialist crisis. Or these trips might just include a wry observation or two. Pekar feels no need to provide a clear justification for why these narratives exist. Instead, many of them feel as if they are little moments cut from a much larger reel of his life. And when a stray observation is used to tie up the end of the narrative, it’s thrown out there as nothing more than a possibility, as if Pekar is telling us, “This might be the moral of the story. Take it or leave it.”

Because of its everyday subject matter and occasional pontifications, the arc of Pekar’s work is impossible to parse with just one or two comics. These larger collections of American Splendor, then, are an ideal format for really digging into Pekar’s work, and The Life and Times of Harvey Pekar is an especially helpful starting point. While the American Splendor series consistently returns to subjects that directly affect Pekar’s life, the comics gets a lot of mileage out of these limited topics, and often his own life becomes merely a jumping off point for a whole host of issues. Pekar himself is not an artist, and has had to rely on wrangling others to illustrate his work. This has actually helped bring out the many facets of American Splendor in a way that a single artist would be insufficient. And each artist seems better suited to different aspects of Pekar’s work. R. Crumb, perhaps his most famous collaborator, brings out Pekar’s interest in racial, linguistic and cultural difference among the disparate ethnic groups of Cleveland, from Jews, African-Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Italians. Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm do a fantastic job of illustrating the nooks and crannies of urban life in Cleveland. Gerry Shamray, perhaps my favorite artist in the collection, delves into Pekar’s mental state, portraying a man at odds with himself, a man who is capable of great insight while at the same time unable to fully clamp down on his emotional distress.

And it’s this contradictory nature of Pekar that makes him a fascinating subject, despite the fact that he lacks the obvious trauma or grand life narrative that characterizes most memoirs and autobiographies. Pekar often pits his words and images against one another. In one story, “Ripoff Chick,” he describes a frustrating courtship of a somewhat daffy girl who’s unselfconsciously new age. While Pekar’s actions towards this woman are often troubling and always hilarious, he’s increasingly critical of his own behavior. Pekar freely admits that his disdain for this woman is at odds with his goals of, essentially, making his way into her pants. And so this split between Pekar the desperate curmudgeon barely containing his rage and disdain towards others brushes up against his exacting critical eye. This contradiction is easy to relate to. We aren’t all word boxes floating above our lives commenting on the world, just as we are not brains disconnected from our bodies. Instead, in our daily lives we are a bundle of emotions and energy that we sometimes have little control over. It is only in reflection that we can maintain a measure of repose. It is to Pekar’s credit that he puts himself in the crosshairs, dissecting not only those around him but his own anxieties as well.

But what is arguably the greatest achievement of Pekar’s work can be found in his somewhat ironic title. Most artistic works that use “American” in their title, or merely take on the mantle of an essentialized American experience, play in the arena of the upper middle class. Think American Beauty or American Pastoral, or even works by authors like Jonathan Franzen or John Updike. As a college dropout who purposefully chooses a tedious day job so that he can actually own his free time, Pekar does not easily fit into the normalized view of who the “idealized” American is. Instead, Pekar undercuts the totalizing effect of American as an adjective by linking it to his largely idiosyncratic life that, paradoxically, ties into experiences shared by many in the United States but are largely invisible in American art. And that’s the genius of Pekar’s work. The mundane, individualized aspects of Pekar’s art feed into universal existentialist questions that we all must confront. Somewhere between Anton Chekov and Jerry Seinfeld lies Harvey Pekar. And the world is much better for his having lived in it.

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.