Frankenweenie

Frankenweenie (4.5/5)

            There’s been a lot of chatter over the last decade or so (at least since his Planet of the Apes remake) claiming that Tim Burton is washed up, out of the game, finito.  For a long time it was easy to dismiss these naysayers as nostalgia worshipers, people who hold their childhood experiences so close to their own hearts that nothing can compare to the movies they loved at age thirteen.  On the one hand, this chorus of doubters conveniently ignores the fact that during Burton’s supposed period of decline he somehow managed to direct Big Fish and Sweeny Todd, two of his absolute best films that pull Burton’s bag of tricks into new territories.  But after the dual duds of Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows it has become increasingly difficult to ignore these doubters.  Where Dark Shadows was inoffensively mediocre, Alice in Wonderland stands as perhaps Burton’s worse film and yet simultaneously his most successful at the box office (AdamSmith you have failed us). 

Frankenweenie, which is based on a live action short film Burton directed while working for Disney, could have gone one of two ways: it could have drawn an unflattering comparison between the Burton of old and the Burton of the new millennium, or it could have showcased a talented director going back to the well and delivering up some of his old magic.  I’m happy to say that Frankenweenie is much more the latter than the former.  Unlike Planet of the Apes or Alice in Wonderland, which felt like a Burtonesque paint job was hastily plastered onto someone else’s movie, Frankenweenie is a wonderful encapsulation of Tim Burton’s obsessions with surprisingly little regard to audience reception.  Like the best family films, Frankenweenie brazenly straddles the line between heartwarming and offensive.

At its core Frankenweenie is a basic retelling of Mary Shelley’s classic monster tale with the mad scientist of Switzerland switched out for a bunch of suburban kids.  The main character is even named Victor Frankenstein in one of several subtle and not so subtle allusions to classic monster movies.  But Burton is far less interested in gothic literature of the 19^th century than he is in b-movies of the mid-20^th century.  In typical Burton fashion, Victor is an awkward outcast who has a love of science but no real friends except for his dog, Sparky.  When Sparky one day gets loose from his leash and gets hit by a car, Victor is naturally despondent.  But after a lesson by his equally strange science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski, on the affects of electricity on dead animals, Victor decides to resurrect his beloved dog. 

Much of Frankenweenie plays out like Tim Burton’s love letter to Tim Burton.  It feels almost as if he too is performing a type of conjuring act, resurrecting his old self for one more film.  The movie is a loving assemblage of b-movie tropes and allusions, from analog mad scientists to Japanese kaiju.  A good number of the references will likely go over the heads of the younger set.  And the dark humor Burton and his team find in the concept of a walking, rotting corpse often comes across as a lighter version of Cronenberg’s body horror.  But these choices are refreshing because they show us that Burton is making this film largely for an audience of one: himself.  Perhaps the most audacious creative choice was the fact that the movie is filmed in black and white.  It’s difficult enough to release a film for adults in black and white anymore, much less one that’s ostensibly a family film.

 

But of all the movie’s characters, the one that interested me the most was Mr. Rzykruski, voiced by Martin Landau who previously turned in one of the best performances of his career in another Tim Burton joint, Ed Wood.  I often have a problem with Hollywood’s depiction of teachers in films.  Too often they come across as self-help gurus (see Dead Poets Society) or they are tasked with saving inner city youth (see Dangerous Minds).  Rarely are films interested in teachers who, you know, actually teach their subject.  We only see Mr. Rzykruski a few times, but judging by his classroom demeanor, he is interested in little more than showing his class how the world works.  There are no gimmicks.  For him, science should be interesting enough.  Later in the film, the parents come together in a meeting to denounce what he is teaching in their school and demand that he resign.  Rzykruski takes this opportunity not to defend himself, but to in insult the parents and condemn them for being so ignorant. 

This scene is in-keeping with Burton’s distrust of the public.  Think of the moment in Edward Scissorhands when the community starts turning on Edward or how easily the Penguin manipulates the people of Gotham in Batman Returns.  In Burton’s world, the public is always one little push away from becoming an ignorant mob.  This depiction of a teacher who stands up to the parents of his pupils is also refreshing in a culture that has decided to lay all of society’s problems at the feet of public school teachers (see Won’t Back Down).  If only teachers would listen to politicians and meet the demands of largely arbitrary testing criteria, then all of our economic and social ills would be solved.  But here Frankenweenie clearly tells the parents to get out of the way of teachers and let them actually teach. 

For anyone who has pined for the Tim Burton of old, then Frankenweenie should be refreshing.  Most children’s movies provide rather routine pabulum as life lessons.  Similar to The Nightmare before Christmas, a film that was about failing at your life goals, Frankenweenie doesn’t trade in easy lessons.  Perhaps the movie’s message could be best summed up by Victor’s father who tells his son, “Sometimes adults don’t know what they’re talking about.”  I think we can all agree that this is both an unconventional message in a children’s movie and that as a statement it is largely true.

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2/5)

           

            Ah, the joys of poverty.  It’s really a load off when you don’t have to worry about being shackled to a job, or having to please your boss, or accumulating an excess of money.  The fortunate poor can spend their days getting in tune with nature or drinking with a few of their best friends.  Who needs money when mother earth seems so willing to spontaneously generate grains, potable water, and livestock?

            At least this seems to be the message of Beasts of the Southern Wild, the type of movie about a poor community in the South that could only have been made by a member of the bourgeois from Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Beasts of the Southern Wild is an insidious film.  It purports to be about people struggling to make it in the world, but it’s actually about the urban elite’s desire to take a camping trip, get away from the hustle of the city, and maybe go canoeing. 

            The movie doesn’t take place in our world, not exactly.  Instead the movie attempts to craft a world of magical realism where a large scale ecological disaster can unfreeze giant boars and where crushing poverty is a choice rather than a failure of the economy.  And yet at the same time the film wants to be about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the New Orleans’s underclass.  It would be easy to claim that the movie can’t have it both ways—that it can’t be a fantasy world that also grapples with difficult real world problems.  But of course that’s just not true.  Plenty of movies have delved into the world of make believe in order to get a better perspective on real world events.  The problem is that Beasts just doesn’t do this very well.

            Beasts’s protagonists is Hushpuppy, a girl about nine years old who lives with her drunken abusive father in a place called the Bathtub.  In what’s assuredly one step removed from images of the noble savage, the movie portrays the denizens of the Bathtub as self-sufficient people who love drinking, dancing, and fireworks.  Their world is eventually upended when some sort of environmental catastrophe ends up flooding the Bathtub and everything else below a series of levees.  While a number of people choose to pack up and leave before they get hit with the flood, Hushpuppy and her father decide to face the storm head on, and they eventually hold up with several other men women and children who also refused to leave their homes.  Even after the flood they appear to manage pretty well until, that is, a group of faceless government agents apparently borrowed from E.T. come across these survivors.  The last residents of the Bathtub are taken to a hospital where they are forced to get medical attention and Hushpuppy even has to wear a dress.  But Hushpuppy and her folks haven’t given up yet.  They organize a prison break of sorts, which, as far as I can tell, consists mostly of pushing over several doctors and nurses who seemed uninterested in chasing them down in the first place.

            If we are going to read this narrative as a corollary to New Orleans after Katrina (and the film seems to invite this reading), then there are a number of problems.  Where the film shows Bathtub residents choosing either to flee or wait out the storm, a large majority of New Orleans residents had no such choice.  Many people stayed in New Orleans prior to the storm because they did not have the money, the transportation, or the accommodations to get out of the city.  To represent this as a clear choice, and, furthermore, to suggest that those who left were running away like wimps (not the film’s preferred choice of words), is at best lunkheaded and at worst offensive to those who died during Hurricane Katrina.  Later the film suggests that Hushpuppy, her father and the rest would have been fine if the “gul’ dern gov’ment” hadn’t gotten into their business.  The central problem after Hurricane Katrina wasn’t too much government—it was that the government had essentially disowned an entire city.  In fact, the people of New Orleans had difficulty getting any substantive assistance from their own government for a number of days.

            I could go on about the film’s uneven handling of alcohol, its narrative failures, and total lack of characterization beyond Hushpuppy.  But because my mother taught me right, I’ll end by pointing out a few things I liked.  The visuals are at times striking (even if a little too reminiscent of those pretentious Levi’s ads).  Quvenzhané Wallis turns in a great performance in the lead role, especially considering that she has to pretty much carry the entire movie.  I admit that I enjoyed watching her run around and yell like an animal.  And the giant boars were pretty cool.  Maybe next time the director should include more giant boars. 

Tame Impala - Lonerism

Tame Impala – Lonerism (4.5/5)

Psychedelia has had a quiet revival over the past several years.  Bands interested in pushing at the limits of rock and roll’s sound have found an ally in a genre that aimed to do just that nearly fifty years ago.  The Black Angels, The Wooden Shjips, and Thee Oh Sees, among others, have mussed up the psychedelic formula by introducing droned out songs or encrusting their music with gravel.  Tame Impala likewise have their own take on the genre that proves that psychedelia still has plenty of life in it after all these years.

Where much of modern day psychedelia is paired with a love for a hardscrabble garage rock edge, Tame Impala makes full use of the studio.  Opening track, “Be Above It,” filters the phrase “I gotta be above it” and its accompanying verses through various means of  electronic transformations while fireworks of noise occasionally go off.  All of these production pyrotechnics could easily tip the album into the darker waters of ELO’s discography.  But what really keeps the album on a steady keel is the fact that at the center of each song is an immediately catchy bass line or keyboard melody.  While chief architect, Kevin Parker, managed almost all of the album’s instruments, there’s a wonderful interplay between keyboards, guitars, and drums that sounds like the work of a full band.  The percussion in particular makes certain that every track bounces along from beginning to end.

But Parker doesn’t get all of the credit.  The album was produced by none other than Dave Fridmann, one of the closest things to a household name when it comes to rock and roll music producers.  Best known for his work with Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips, Fridmann is a natural fit for Parker’s psychedelic ambitions.  I must admit that I’ve always had a mixed relationship with Fridmann’s production.  While I’ve appreciated his quest to open up a band’s sound, his tendency to compress each album to the hilt not only causes ear fatigue but also flattens the sound of the artist.  When there’s no difference in the levels between vocals and drums, then the music starts to lack any depth.  Luckily, the problem of compression is mostly absent from Lonerism (at least by the standards of today’s music).  Perhaps Fridmann has learned his lesson or perhaps he is reacting to the fact that everyone’s compressing their music these days.  Regardless, Lonerism is easily one of the best production jobs of his career.

Thanks to Fridmann’s influence and Parker’s talents, Lonerism makes a unique mark on the music landscape.  While Fridmann’s production wraps up each song in a crystalline cocoon, Parker’s writing skills ensure that, at its center, each song is worth listening to.  

Titus Andronicus - Local Business

Titus Andronicus – Local Business (3.5)

What can you possibly do to follow up on a masterpiece?  This question must have invariably hovered over the group Titus Andronicus when they were faced with crafting another album following their epic, The Monitor.  The Monitor fits the definition of a masterpiece so snugly that I wouldn’t be surprised if lead singer Patrick Sickles and his gang had struggled with the above question for quite some time before deciding to go into the studio and write a straight up rock album. 

Local Business, Andronicus’s third album, sees the band trying to rein things back somewhat.  Gone are the readings of Albert Camus or the overarching historical thematics.  Instead, the band has replaced its prog-rock ambitions with a renewed focus on autobiography.  Sickles’s lyrics revolve almost exclusively around the life of a twenty-something as well as strictly personal issues like his struggles with a rare eating disorder.  The result is decidedly scaled down.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with attempting to strip things down, but at times the old tricks Androncus could rely on for their older albums don’t work quite as well in this setting.  Their use of a continual refrain, which used to sound energetic, can now sound somewhat tired.  Smaller interludes, which in earlier albums had served as a connective tissue for their grand themes, now sound like they’re stalling for time.

The subject that Sickle returns to again and again is his own body.  The body becomes a means for escape and something that he is trapped within.  Sex and alcohol and their bodily impact serve as a means to flee existential questions, a means to escape from the oppressive life of the mind.  And yet, at the same time, there is a sense that the body itself is also a trap.  The first song off the album, “Ecce Homo,” is a reference to a genre in classical art that depicts the torture of Jesus and translates into “Behold the Man.”  In it Sickles sings, “We’re breaking out of our bodies now / Time to see what’s outside them.”  But his attempts to escape his body appears to be refuted later in the song “My Eating Disorder,” where Sickles recounts his struggles with selective eating disorder.  No matter what, he doesn’t seem capable of thinking his way outside of the choices his body has made for him. 

There’s no doubt that Titus Andronicus are a bright group of musicians who will leave behind them a great oeuvre.  And even if Local Business isn’t as impressive as their last two outings, there are some fantastic tracks here.  “In a Big City” is the kind of Pogues meets Springsteen that we have come to expect from this band.  And “I Am the Electric Man” is a surprisingly effective left turn into the realm of what can only be described as Motown R&B with a ragged edge.  Overall, Local Business isn’t a bad stop gap between now and Titus Andronicus’s next magnum opus.   

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas (4/5)

Cloud Atlas is that rare Hollywood artifact: a big budgeted work of art that also happens to grapple with cosmic level questions at the center of human existence.  The film is absolutely sincere in the sense that these questions of how we fit in the universe and what we mean to each other are clearly foremost on the mind of the directors.  And the plurality of the word director is important, since it took no less than three people helming this monstrosity in order to bring it together: Andy and Lana Wachowski of The Matrix fame and Tom Tykwer who is most known for Run Lola Run.  The result is the kind of film that we haven’t quite seen before and most likely (judging by its box office numbers) will never see again.

Cloud Atlas follows six separate storylines across the millennia, and each narrative is nearly rich enough to stand on its own.  In chronological order, we follow a young lawyer, Adam Ewing, who is making a trip back from a slave plantation in the Pacific; a gay composer, Robert Frobisher, who plans on making his mark in the world of music by working for an aging curmudgeon; a muckraking journalist from the 1970s, Luisa Rey, who is working on uncovering what might be another Three Mile incident on the West Coast; a desperate editor, Timothy Cavendish, who becomes caught up in continually escalating series of troubles; a clone, Sonmie, who, living in a future dystopia, slowly learns to question the world she has been programmed to accept; and a tribesman in a post-apocalyptic world who must escort Meronym, a woman from a more advanced people, up a mountain to a nearly forgotten cathedral of sorts. 

 

Naturally, this is a lot to fit within a single movie, and the film has an overstuffed running time of three hours.  And yet, the story never felt like it dragged.  As you might guess, the film does not run through each story in sequence (this is the tact of the novel the film is based on), but instead each story is interwoven with the other, creating a much larger tapestry that engulfs any single thread.  Where the novel makes drastic stylistic shifts according to each section, because of the way the stories are cross stitched onto one another, the film doesn’t make similar visual transformations.  But there are clearly delineated genres for each section.  The story of the muckraking journalist has the feel of an era appropriate political thriller like Three Days of Condor, where the dystopian world of clones and dark cityscapes owes a lot to cyberpunk (a genre that the Wachowski’s worked in previously for their most famous creation).  But the directors all come together to make sure that we move nearly seamlessly from one narrative to the other, and we pass through moments of tension in one world only to have it relived by an action sequence in another until we are finally pulled back into a scenario where our nerves have tightened up.  In other words, this film must have been hell to edit.

There is no doubt that the film is an incredible technical accomplishment, but many viewers might ask, what’s the point?  There are a number of curious choices that will leave audiences scratching their heads.  Perhaps the most distracting will be the reuse of most of the principal actors.  From big Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks and Halle Berry to lesser knowns like Ben Whishaw and Doona Bae, the film is sprinkled with a number of major and minor actors who take up a different role in each story.  While this is an interesting theory in practice, the result is a lot of awkward makeup jobs.  It’s difficult to take a story seriously when it looks like a character’s face might fall off at any moment (although, it is nearly worth it see Hugo Weaving don a wig and play a Nurse Ratched type nursing home tyrant).  The poor makeup is a clear sign that the weight of this project nearly crushed its directors, and it’s no surprise that it took three principal artists to carry this thing to completion.

While some might (justifiably) critique the film for how the makeup really shows its seams, others have decried Cloud Atlas for promoting New Agey bull.  And I admit that there are moments where I thought the film was starting to become too granola, but by the end of the movie it had made an end run around my defenses, and I was won over.  There are moments in the film that suggest that these characters are experiencing a form of reincarnation.  But I don’t think the film limits itself to a spiritual reading.  As someone who is skeptical of religious message movies, I don’t think I would have enjoyed this film if could only be read through a spiritual lens.  Recycling actors is more about simultaneously freeing and entrapping these characters in their race and gender.  On the one hand, because the characters switch race and gender throughout the film, it shows ways in which our bodily selves are physical entrapments and social constructs.  The body becomes ephemeral.  But these characters are also socially limited and segmented because of their race.  The 19^th century lawyer, Adam Ewing, has to defy his class and gender position in order to establish a friendship with an escaped slave, for example. 

Similarly, characters influence each other through real material objects that seem to skip their way down the centuries.  The diary of Adam Ewing ends up in the hands of the composer Robert Frobisher.  In turn, the love letters that Frobisher wrote to his paramour, Rufus Sixmith, are passed down to Luisa Rey, the investigative journalist.  Texts and works of art filter down through the ages, each time providing the current owner a glimpse into the inner lives of others.  The readers of the different texts are drawn to them because they recognize a little of themselves.  The transference of art across the centuries reminded me of the Hindu conception of time.  Where modern Westerners conceptualize time in relatively small chunks—looking at discrete decades or centuries—Hindu beliefs conceive of time on a much larger scale.  Hindu religion gives us the idea of the kalpa, or a single aeon that lasts for 4.32 billion years.  By expanding how we look at time, it also, paradoxically, can change how we see our place in the world.  Instead of viewing ourselves as insignificant, we might ask how small events millennia ago, events we might not have direct knowledge over, affect our present day.  In this sense, our impact on the world might very well outstrip our time living on it. 

If Cloud Atlas can be defined by any sort of genre, then it is the “everything is connected” movie.  But where others of these films have little more to say than the simple fact that there are a lot of coincidences and event impact disparate people, Cloud Atlas asks us to consider our place in the universe, to completely reconceive of how we look at history, and how art might transcend our subjective realities.  Not every character accomplishes what he or she sets out to do, but rather than being failures, their accomplishments become the inspiration for those who come after them.  When one particularly evil character belittles Adam Ewing’s wish to become a suffragist, calling him nothing more than a meaningless drop in the ocean, Ewing responds with, “What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?”  Tykwer and the Wachowski’s seem to be telling us that despite our insignificance, we matter.  This is an important message, and one that deserves a retelling.  While some critics have been dismissive of Cloud Atlas, there is no doubt that the film, like the letters and manuscripts passed down in the movie itself, will live on, and it will no doubt gain its place as either a cult classic or a lost masterpiece.  

The Wolf Man

The Wolf Man (3/5)

The Wolf Man is one of those films that you know even if you’ve never actually sat down and watched it.  It has become a sort of ur-text for werewolf films, and the mythology of the werewolf that’s posited in this film has made its way through each subsequent movie about a man transforming into a wolf creature.  The Wolf Man was made during Universal’s “monster movie” heyday, but unlike Dracula and Frankenstein, The Wolf Man isn’t based on a previous existing text.  And while I would have to strain a little if I wanted to call it a “classic,” I can, at the very least, appreciate its role in constructing a modern myth out of cast off legends. 

The movie begins when Larry Talbot returns to his father’s manor in England after the death of his brother.  Larry’s father, John Talbot, is played by the erudite Claude Raines, and the two are a complete mismatch.  Where John is a man of theory and academia, Larry works well with his hands but freely admits he doesn’t exactly have a lot of book smarts.  It’s somewhat puzzling that despite John’s upper class English accent, Larry sounds like he’s been working in a Pittsburg steel mill. 

But Larry, played by Lon Cheney Sr., isn’t so broken up by his brother’s death that he can’t hit on the local women.  While looking through his father’s telescope, Larry happens to spot his neighbor, Gwen trying on some earrings.  In what is arguably the most awkward pick up scene in movie history, Larry proceeds to go over to Gwen’s family shop to ask her if he can buy a pair of earrings.  When she offers up a few that are on display, Larry tells her that he actually wants the ones she was just trying on in her room.  I honestly don’t know why Gwen didn’t turn around and flee the shop right then.  After insisting that he will pick her up at eight that night (Gwen pretty much turns him down repeatedly), Larry is able to convince Gwen to grudgingly go out with him. 

At the very least, Gwen is smart enough to bring along a chaperone on her creepy date.  Gwen, Larry, and the third wheel go see the local gypsies and get their fortunes read.  From here you can pretty much guess what happens.  The third wheel is attacked and killed by a wolf, which in turn is killed by Larry who happens to have a silver topped cane on hand, but in the scuffle he is bitten.  Now cursed as a werewolf, Larry must come to terms with his monstrous transformations.  At this point the audience might draw a connection between Larry’s animalism and his repressed sexuality or perhaps the dual nature of man.  But don’t worry, audience member, because John Talbot helpfully makes this point again and again.  While John doesn’t believe in werewolfs, he does think people sometimes suffer from lycanthrope as a mental disorder, which is really just a metaphor for our innate animal urges.  Who needs subtext when you have text-text. 

 

Up until now I have been a little hard on this film.  But watching it is an interesting look back in history to pre-slasher era horror films.  It’s interesting to note that questions of psycho-sexuality seem imbedded in horror movies long before Carol Clover’s study, Men, Women and Chain Saws.  Besides, the movie is actually pretty good whenever the director has a chance to film a simulacrum of the English countryside at night.  These shots are surprisingly dark for a black and white film, causing the images to devolve into a sequence of abstract shapes.  He also brilliantly shoots through the gnarled branches of tortured looking trees and surrounds them with Fibonacci-like swirls of smoke.  The set design on this film is clearly top notch.  In fact, it’s a shame the movie wasn’t made a couple decades earlier as a silent-film.  If you turn off the volume, you might very well have yourself a horror classic. 

Back to the Future: The Game

Back to the Future: The Game (4/5)

In the early years of the 21^st century it became clear that nostalgia had reached the point where its own gravity would cause its collapse, resulting in a black hole of childhood reminiscence, film reimaginings of decades old cartoons, and impeccable recreations of popular music culled from the past fifty years.  It has gotten to the point where, once you reach this black hole’s event horizon, there is no possibility of escape.  You are doomed to spend your remaining years looking backwards at your formative years. 

I’ll admit to being more than a little anxious about the awesome power of nostalgia’s gravitational pull.  But I’ll let you in on a secret.  It’s not because I never want to return to my childhood.  No, it’s because, like anyone living in the new millennium, I too feel a pull towards reliving old cartoons, movies, and music.  In fact, sometimes I’m afraid I love nostalgia too much.  As a result, my defenses go up whenever I sense that a product is carefully constructed to send me back on a recollection bender.  So it’s a real compliment when I write that Telltale’s Back to the Future: The Game, with its knowing intertextuality and reverence for the original trilogy, easily disarmed me. 

While Back to the Future hasn’t embedded itself in the popular culture firmament in the same way as Star Wars and Indiana Jones, there are some of us who hold this series in just as high regard.  In other words, the bar was set pretty high for Telltale Games.  The developers smartly decided to push up the narrative a year after Marty and Doc have returned from the Old West.  So instead of our two adventurers attempting to get back to 1985, they’re trying to return to 1986.  This also means that Back to the Future: The Game is likely the closest we will ever get to Back to the Future Part IV. 

If the movie trilogy was mostly about saving Marty’s past, present, and future, the game revolves around young Emmet “Doc” Brown and his struggles deciding between his love of science and his father’s plans for him to go into law.  The story begins in 1986.  Doc has gone missing and his house is being put up for sale.  You begin as Marty looking through all of Doc’s byzantine collection of gadgets, which also serves as a walk through memory lane, from a wall filled with clocks to an oversized guitar amp.  Thanks to the Delorean’s retrieval system, Marty is able to, eventually, find where in time Doc has been stranded, and it happens to be prohibition era Hill Valley, 1931. 

 

Upon making his way to 1931, Marty discovers that Doc, under the pseudonym Carl Sagan, has been framed for burning down the local speakeasy.  Your job, then, is to break him out of jail before he is gunned down by the local gang (lead of course by a Tannen), but to do so you must convince young Emmett Brown to stray from his duties as his father’s law clerk so that he can invent a drill that will help Marty with his jail break.  Of course, even after you save Doc and make your way back to 1986, you soon notice that the time line is out of whack.  Over the course of five episodes, you pong back and forth between past and present attempting to reset Hill Valley to semi-normal. 

The single shifting variable happens to be Hill Valley’s local teetotaler, Edna Strickland.  While making certain that Kid Tannen (local bootlegger and father of Biff Tannen) gets nabbed by the coppers, Marty inadvertently sets up Strickland with the young Emmett Brown.  The pairing of a science obsessed Emmett and a control freak Edna reverberates through the timeline and transforms Hill Valley into a police state.  Your goal then becomes to dissolve Brown and Strickland’s relationship back in 1931.  This may in fact be the only game where you must prevent a totalitarian police state by serving as a cock block. 

The fact that, as Marty, you must break off Doc’s relationship in order to win the game only further emphasizes what is perhaps the mono-theme of major blockbusters: male bonding.  I’m not suggesting that Marty and Doc are up to any funny business behind the scenes.  But I am suggesting that, despite a love interest here and there, the Back to the Future movies were chiefly about homosocial relationships.  Aside from Oedipal anxiety, the first film revolved mostly around the relationship between Marty and the 1955 version of his dad.  In the second film, Marty’s girlfriend, Jennifer, is allowed to hitch a ride to the future, only to be quickly sidelined.  The central dilemma of the final film is Doc’s decision to either stay with Clara in the past or to return with Marty to the future, and his final decision, to stay in the past (albeit, briefly), was arguably made by the screenwriters in order to reassert his heterosexuality.

But enough about the old trilogy.  The game makers have absolutely nailed the dynamic between the odd pairing of mad scientist and slacker teen that typifies their relationship.  You can hear Doc sputter out strings of technobabble and Marty drop 80s appropriate slang.  Of course, it helps that they got Christopher Lloyd to reprise his role, and even though Michael J. Fox didn’t come back to voice Marty, the voice actor, A.J. Locascio, does an eerily spot on impression. 

 

There are a number of throwbacks to the original series, but the one that will hit you straight in the medulla oblongata nostalgia center is the original music by Alan Silvestri.  The moment the majestic, rising horns sound out the opening notes to the Back to the Future theme, I guarantee you every scene from all three films will come flooding back to you.  In addition, there are plenty of allusions that reach back to the film, from reminiscent bits of dialogue to familiar action beats.  At times, all of the loving connections to the films threaten to make the game feel like a retread, but since the movies themselves took part in these sorts of call backs, ultimately I think it’s in keeping with the spirit of Robert Zemickis’s creation.  Perhaps the only drawback to the game is that, as an adventure game, it is entirely too easy.  This might be bad for adventure gamers, but it likely won’t bother those who are unfamiliar with the genre. 

I’ll admit that I was originally reluctant to look back at my past.  I don’t want to be like one of those old hippies still going on about the time they saw The Grateful Dead back in ’72.  There’s too much great art and culture released every year for me to spend too much time on things I loved when I was a child.  And yet there’s still value to be found in thinking like a child and of loving something without reserve like a child.  I may not want to live in the past, but it sure is a great place to visit now and then. 

Black Swans - Occasion for Song

Black Swans – Occasion for Song (4.5/5)

Death may be the most difficult topic to honestly, straightforwardly address in popular music.  The topic is so imposing that it is nearly impossible to fully explore the one constant of human existence within a three or four minute song.  Luckily for Black Swans, they tackle the subject of death not through a single song, but over the course of a nearly hour long album.  The single loss that hovers over the album happens to be that of Noel Sayre, the band’s violinist who died suddenly in a swimming pool.  The front cover pictures the stark, imposing image of a diving board.  And absence is at the heart of the album, since much of the music and lyrics are less about death itself than with coming to grips with loss.

“Portsmouth, Ohio” is the only song that directly grapples with Sayre’s death, and it serves as a sort of emotional and thematic centerpiece.  Black Swans tackle the subject with a hushed understatement, preferring to let the real life narrative speak for itself without a forced emotional push.  The song’s refrain, “Nobody’s supposed to die three days before the Fourth of July,” is delivered matter of fact like.  Within that phrase is imbedded the unthinkable nature of death—that, try as we might, we can never truly wrap our heads around the idea of not existing.  It also emphasizes the devastating abruptness of such an accident, a reminder that no one is guaranteed the supposedly requisite 75 years. 

The rest of the album approaches death obliquely.  Even when the subject matter seems to deal with our past, because of the shadow Sayre’s death casts across the album, each song seems to fashioning a cartographic image of mortality.  When singer, Jerry Decicca, tells us, “I give one hundred dollar bills to homeless men, so they can get fucked up right,” I can’t help but think that he’s giving us a perverse reinterpretation of carpe diem.  In “Work Song” Decicca ruminates on the tension between material necessities and spiritual fulfillment, singing “Watch the seahawk dive, it needs food just like you and I to survive.”  For some of his best lyrics, he relies on concrete imagery rather than abstraction in order to cut to the pith of his meaning.

Each song sounds both lush and ramshackle, like an intricate bird’s nest thatched together by twigs and mud.  Decicca’s singing is similarly rugged, falling somewhere between Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan’s speak-sing.  But the most interesting aspect of their music is what’s missing.  Instead of trying to replicate Sayre’s violin, Black Swans instead chose to do without the instrument, possibly deciding that some things are just irreplaceable. 

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon (4/5)

            Over the course of his career, Michael Chabon has built a body of work that seems determined to prove that, paradoxically, we may engage with complicated, real-world entanglements through escapist literature.  Kavalier and Clay detailed the Jewish immigrant experience by looking at the early formation of superheroes and comic books.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union took on questions of national identity and sovereignty while telling a noirish mystery adventure.  At this point it seems strange to see Chabon come to reality through the decidedly un-otherworldly genre of the personal essay.  Chabon’s collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, gives fans a glimpse into the real life obsessions that have made his novels unique imprints on the world of literature.

            Anyone who has read his magnum opus Kavalier and Clay knows that Chabon is perfectly capable of writing novels of intellectual and physical weight, so it is somewhat refreshing to read this series of airy musings that might be best read during a sequence of lazy afternoons.  Chabon’s ruminations are evenly split between autobiographical exploration and pop culture inquiry.  In one of the more intimate essays, “The Heartbreak Kid,” Chabon recounts flashes of his first marriage and waxes nostalgic about his relationship with his first father-in-law.  And yet just a couple dozen pages prior, he was tracing the evolution of Legos and doing his best impression of a septuagenarian while decrying their recent glut of licensing deals.  But perhaps the best individual essays of the collection happen when the autobiographical and the cultural cross paths, like in “A Woman of Valor” where he compares his wife to the Jack Kirby superheroine Big Barda (which, if you are a DC Comics fan, is perhaps the most romantic sentiment ever uttered). 

            I had the good fortune to briefly talk to Michael Chabon while he signed my copy of this book.  During our brief back and forth, my wife asked him if Manhood for Amateurs was a response to his wife’s collection of essays Bad Mother (which is also excellent, by the way).  He said that he wrote Manhood as a sort of companion piece to Bad Mother.  After hearing this I couldn’t help but line up both books.  The essay genre seems like a more natural fit for Ayelet Waldman, who managed to go to some difficult places in her writing.  Wanting to limit an audience’s access to your personal life is a perfectly reasonable reaction to writing non-fiction, but it would be a lie to say that it doesn’t in some manner limit this collection.  Still, I’ve always felt that it is sometimes necessary for an author to write minor works in order to prove he is a major artist.

On Pitchfork and Lists

 Several weeks ago Pitchfork.com, often described as the hipster Bible of music websites, put up an application that allowed you to arrange, in order of quality, the best albums of the last fifteen years, which also happens to be how long Pitchfork has been in business.  What often bothers people about Pitchfork (myself included) is the definitive way in which they present their tastes. The website does not include a comment section, presumably because it could serve as a platform to launch an attack against the aesthetic arguments of Pitchfork’s reviewers.  The lack of a comment section ensures that there will be no oppositional discourse to Pitchfork’s tastemaking.  In a world of web 2.0 where interactivity has increasingly become essential, this decision by Pitchfork appears more and more to be a deliberate strategy.  Their obsession with lists also reinforces the idea that they are engaged in a canonical enterprise with the end goal being the construction of what constitutes a “proper” understanding of popular music.  Their opinions are less arguments than they are divine truths inscribed onto a tablet and brought down from the mountain top.

So the “People’s List,” as Pitchfork called their project, at first appeared like a nice way to admit that they had placed a tyrannical emphasis on their own judgment.  It was time to give back to their readers, to let them make the tough decisions.  I personally enjoyed passing along best of lists with people I know like we were trading baseball cards.  However, problems crept up once again when Pitchfork aggregated their reader’s picks.  The end result ended up looking like something that Pitchfork, rather than its readers, would have put out.  But in hindsight this isn’t terribly surprising.  People read Pitchfork because they are interested in indie-rock music, and in return Pitchfork helps shaped the aesthetic taste of its audience.  The end result was, in a word, bland.

This caused Pitchfork critics to go into a fury.  Over at Slate they accused Pitchfork readers of being racists and claimed that the entire list was a “scandal” (I’m not making this up, folks).  Gawker’s response was, unsurprisingly, heavy on the snark.  For me, however, all of this discussion of lists reminded me of the wonderful Walter Benjamin essay, “Unpacking MyLibrary.”  In this essay, Benjamin analyzes the process of book collecting.  He notes that it is much more and much less about reading the books in one’s collection.  In one sense, Benjamin argues, book collecting is a sort of obsessive compulsive disorder, or, as he writes, “For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as an order?” (60). What’s more, collecting is just as much about the corporeal aspect of the books as it is about their actual content.  Physically assembling the books in one place, regardless of whether or not you have read all of them, seems to be the main goal of the book collecting obsessive. 

In this sense, collecting books is more about the collector than the books themselves.  The same can be said about the creation of best of lists.  In some sense, they’re less than the sum of their parts.  A list that attempts to collect the best films of the last twenty years, for example, tells us an awful lot about the person who created that list, but usually tells us very little about the films themselves.  This is just Benjamin’s obsessive compiler of rare book artifacts transmogrified into the digital age.  The internet is overrun with enumeration.  If you want someone to read a web article, then start typing out numbers, and, if you aren’t pressed for time, throw some paragraphs in there as well.  I mean, the website Cracked is based around the idea of creating listings that in no reasonable sense could be organized from worst to best. 

But this doesn’t mean that lists are necessarily pointless.  Like I said, they tell us an awful lot about the compiler.  I enjoyed reading the various lists of favorite albums that floated around the web over the last few weeks.  They taught me a lot about the person who put these lists together.  And every once in a while they pointed out some new classics that I felt compelled to track down.  But once these lists were compiled into Pitchfork’s uber-list, they lost their individuality. They started to tell us more about the kind of music Pitchfork grants 9.2s and 9.6s to than about their readers.  These days we collect in order to create a mosaic of ourselves.  If you’re curious as to what albums I came up with, then you can see them here.  Putting it together, I think I learned a little about the last fifteen years of my life.

Wrap Up to Nolan's Batman Trilogy

Over the course of his Batman trilogy, Nolan has produced three distinct films with a shared aesthetic.  Although each film takes place within the same canonical Batman universe, they take increasingly different positions on the political issues of the day.  Since Momento, his first full length film, Nolan has always been interested in pop-philosophy, and this did not change when he was given a much bigger budget to work with.  For this he gets a lot of credit.  But what has been disturbing over the course of the three films is their gradual drift into conservative ideology.

It's easy to read Batman Begins as a rebuke of America's foreign policy during the "War on Terror," what with its questions about justice and vengeance and where the line between them lies.  But all of these questions are brought up naturally and are carried along by characterization.  They fit right at home in a Batman movie.  And the fact that Batman is fighting against terrorists (albeit comic book terrorists) draws an obvious parallel between the events in the film and America's foreign policy. 

A lot of these same questions came up in The Dark Knight, which is arguably a better film (I kind of wish I had bumped it up half a star in my rating) even if it doesn't handle the larger issues as well.  The part of the movie that people on the left criticized the most was Batman's cell phone hacking.  In the climax Batman hacks into all of Gotham's cell phones so he can use them as some sort of sonar devices in order to track down the Joker.  Plenty have noted the similarity between Batman's phone hacking and the actual phone hacking done by the government.  But while Batman's decision to essentially take over all the cell phones in Gotham is obviously a violation of privacy, it is arguably nowhere near as invasive as the NSA's search through the e-mailand phone conversations of American citizens.  Do we really want the government listening to the conversations between friends, family, and lovers?  First of all, the issue is simplified.  Of course, the audience wants Batman to broach the law because the Joker is about to blow up two boats.  Nolan has basically constructed a ticking time bomb situation, which also happens to be a situationthat has never occurred in real life.  (Besides, if you only have a matter of minutes, wouldn't the mad bomber just be able to hang for that short period of time?  The hypothetical sort of defeats itself.)  This is radically different from having the government creep into our personal communication network over the course of years.  And the movie's proposed solution, that we just blow up the capabilities when we're done with them, just doesn't cut it in a democracy where not only do you set a precedent, but that precedent can be later used by someone you wouldn't trust.  (This is why we must be just as critical of Obama when he skirts the law as we would have been with Bush). 

Still, The Dark Knight comes up with some interesting questions, including whether we would be ready to disproportionately punish criminals if it means that we can save our own necks.  Unfortunately, Nolan loses all of his ability to pose interesting questions in the third installment, The Dark Knight Rises.  Where the first two films offered interesting queries about the world we lived in, for the third film I had to actively ignore some of meager attempts at social commentary in the third film in order to enjoy it.  Ultimately, I liked the film thanks to its ambition and the care it takes with its characters.  Still, Nolan's attempt to deal with questions of social justice and class wouldn't cut it in a freshman philosophy course, and they certainly don't work on screen.  As I mentioned in my review, the entire set up is unclear to begin with.  (Is it the underclass who are trashing Gotham or just the prisoners, or are they being treated as one and the same?)  Perhaps the most laughable line in the entire film comes from Selina Kyle's friend.  When the two of them are surveying the damage done to a ransacked mansion, Selina remarks that this was someone's house once, to which her acquantance says, "Now it's everybody's house."  Don't you see, people?  If we ask the wealthy to pay a marginally higher tax rate, then it will be total bedlam!  Granted, I'm not sure if this is exactly what Nolan is saying, but I don't think he has a clue as to what he is saying either.

The end of the film winds up pitting those in power, the police force and the wealthy aristocrat Bruce Wayne, against the prisoner population of Gotham.  The status quo must be set right.  This is an inherently anti-populist view of the world.  It is only those few elites who, in the old world, could exert control over the many that must regain control and set things to the way that they used to be.  Batman as an archetype can be used as a political symbol for the left or the right.  He does not inherently signify a particular ideology, so I don't think positioning him as a neoconservative is automatically wrong.  But I do wish that Nolan would acknowledge some of these issues, which he at least attempted in the second film. 

 

I’m reminded of Frank Miller’s work on The Dark Knight Returns, which asked us to question whether or not we should condone the actions of a vigilante.  Throughout the book, Miller uses news style interviews of Gotham’s citizens to show how different people project their own fears and prejudices on Batman’s actions.  Some decry his actions while others praise him.  And then, in the midst of these opinions, one man on the street gives the following viewpoint: “Batman? Yeah, I think he’s a-okay.  He’s kicking just the right butts – butts the cops ain’t kicking, that’s for sure.  Hope he goes after the homos next” (45).  The line is brilliant because the reader can feel himself agreeing with the man until the brutally bigoted last sentence.  Here, Miller asks us to question populism in a more complex way than Nolan.  At what point should we shield the minority from, as the philosopher De Toqueville called it, the “tyranny of the majority”?  But Miller teases out these issues in a couple of sentences when Nolan couldn’t do so over the course of nearly three hours.  It is not that the issues that Nolan brings up shouldn’t be discussed.  It is that these issues should be discussed with nuance, vigor, and intelligence.

On the internet people like to bandy about the word pretentious, but it is often used incorrectly.  When people call a work of art pretentious, what they really mean is that the film is too difficult or esoteric for them.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines “pretentious” as “Attempting to impress by affecting greater importance or merit than is actually possessed” (OED).  So a pretentious work of art is something that thinks it has more to add to the conversation than it actually does.  The Dark Knight Rises is often pretentious in the truest sense of the word: it is not nearly as smart as it thinks it is.  But, I would still rather watch something with a pretense to greatness than a film that doesn’t even try.  I might not love The Dark Knight Rises as much as I wanted to, but I do respect its ambitions.