Before Sunrise

Before Sunrise (5/5)

Richard Linklater is the master of the conversation film.  From his first movie, Slacker, to his most recent creation, Bernie, he has always relied on dialogue to carry his narrative.  For some this is a weakness.  Film is a visual medium, after all.  Linklater’s films may not be as visually striking as other auteurs, but in subduing the visual element, he has refocused his narratives on the intimate, often mundane conversations that take place between his characters.  Nowhere in his filmography is this more apparent than Before Sunrise, a romantic film about two couples who meet in Vienna, strike up a half a day’s worth of a relationship, and, of course, madly fall in love.

The two protagonists of Before Sunrise, Celine and Jessie, first meet on a train as it’s pulling into Vienna.  Celine has switched seats to get out of earshot of a bickering couple, and the two strike up a conversation that’s unnaturally cut short because Jessie is flying out of Europe tomorrow and Celine is supposed to continue on the train ride.  Both characters are twenty-somethings who are away from home—Jessie is American and Celine is French—but they are well suited conversationalists.  Before getting off the train, Jessie decides to offer Celine an opportunity to spend more time together.  He doesn’t have any extra money, so he was planning on just walking around the city all day and all night until it is time to head to the airport, and he thinks it would be a lot more enjoyable with Celine’s company. After a brief hesitation, Celine agrees, and the rest of the film consists of the two characters casually wondering around Vienna engaging in a series of conversations, some personal, some profound, and others overly extravagant.

From there the plot doesn’t get any more complicated.  While each character has his or her own unique disappointments in life, there are no huge reveals, no life defining moment that explains who they are or why they are on this journey.  Both are smart, literate, and liberal, but where Jessie is somewhat of a cynic, Celine has a bit of a radical streak.  In most romantic films there is some contrived event that prevents the two characters from getting together.  There’s nothing so obvious in Before Sunrise, but Jessie and Celine do fight against their own disappointments in the world.  Watching their parents and others who have weathered life, they have realized that there are no happy endings.  If there’s anything that keeps these two characters apart, it’s the realization that what they have cultivated over the course of a night in Vienna cannot last.  Their relationship, as it exists now, has an expiration date.  For most of the film, they are guarded, afraid of really falling for each other.

In something of a surprise, Before Sunrise produced two sequels (and Jessie and Celine made cameo appearances in Richard Linklater’s film, Waking Life).  After watching Before Sunrise yet again, this makes a lot more sense than you might think.  Throughout the film, Jessie and Celine discuss ways in which family and profession, perception and reality whittle down our idealized romantic notions.  At one point, Jessie says, “It's just, people have these romantic projections they put on everything that's not based on any kind of reality.”  And it is, after all, a bickering married couple that causes Celine to change seats and meet Jessie in the first place.  Both characters are aware that they may very well become that couple.  In this sense the ending where both Jessie and Celine agree to meet at the same place in six months might have stood as a beautiful cop out.  The ambiguity allows us to envision what might happen in their future without fully exploring these implications.  To Linklater’s credit, he decided to do the impossible and find out where these characters are nine years down the road.  As Celine says at one point, “It’s like some kind of sociological experiment.”

Star Trek into Darkness

Star Trek into Darkness (3/5)

My first introduction to the world of Star Trek was not the original series but the second television show, Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I may have seen reruns of the original series before I sat down with my family to watch the pilot episode of TNG, but if so it has been lost to memory.  I do remember watching reruns of TOS after familiarizing myself with TNG and trying to wrap my head around the fact that these two shows were supposed to comprise the same fictional universe.  As I got older, I eventually came to understand the shared philosophy between each iteration of Star Trek: a secular humanist view of the future.  Star Trek exists in a world where the limitless optimism of the 1960s never died.  I continued watching Star Trek shows and movies for years after my first introduction, but eventually I bailed sometime in the middle of Voyager’s run (my zeal for Star Trek had its limits).  Still, the first three television shows found a unique way of exploring and commenting on creator Gene Roddenberry’s image of the future: TOS presented us with the dangers and surprises of exploration; TNG constructed a lived in image of different worlds attempting to share what sometimes seemed like a small galaxy; and DS9, freed from Roddenberry’s creative vision, actually started to question some of the mid-century zeal for the future that characterized the first two shows. 

I started this review with this brief sketch of my relationship to Star Trek because no one goes into a long running series like this unencumbered.  Even those who have never seen an episode of any of the many series have an image (right or wrong) of what Star Trek stands for.  But you should know that I have an emotional, intellectual, and personal connection to the franchise, and this of course colors how I watched this movie.  When J.J. Abrams first decided to reboot the series, I wasn’t sure what to think.  I was cautiously optimistic that he would be able to capture some of the fun of the original, but I in no way expected him to mimic the same pop-philosophy that had always characterized the series and made its way, in abbreviated form, into the movies.  (I can’t imagine that Abrams is much of a Herman Melville fan, for instance).  Keeping my expectations in check helped me to really enjoy 2008’s Star Trek.  Abrams transformed the movie into a series of sometimes enjoyable, sometimes dumb, and sometimes exhausting action set pieces, but he also managed to capture the relationship between the principal characters surprisingly well. 

But where Star Trek had the benefit of low expectations, Star Trek into Darkness had the burden of showing where Abrams could take this series and the anticipatory build up of five years, a long time in-between movies.  While it’s no unmitigated disaster, Star Trek into Darkness is a mixed bag.  It suffers from the usual problems that plague J.J. Abrams work, like the fact that it works when the gears are moving and the audience has little time to reflect on what’s happening, but it starts to flail when things turn serious.

Typical of a J.J. Abrams joint, STiD begins in media res, with Kirk and McCoy fleeing a group of natives after stealing a religious artifact.  They hope to lure the island community, a burgeoning society of sentient beings, away from an active volcano long enough so that Spock can set a cold fusion bomb that will deactivate the volcano, allowing the natives to live long enough to enter the Bronze Age.  Kirk soon has to decide whether he should leave Spock to die in the volcano or if he should reveal the Enterprise to the natives and beam Spock out of danger.  Obviously, Kirk decides on the latter, and in doing so he breaks the Prime Directive, a central tenant of Starfleet that says explorers should not interfere with the development of alien civilizations.  Kirk leaves all of this out of his official report, but Spock doesn’t, which leads to Kirk’s mentor and senior officer, Captain Pike, dressing him down and relieving him of command of the Enterprise. 

Shortly after Pike has taken command of the Enterprise, a mysterious terrorist played by Benedict Cumberbatch blows up a building used by Starfleet and later attacks a meeting of senior Starfleet officers who have convened to decide how best to tackle this act of terrorism.  In the attack, Pike is killed, sending Kirk into revenge mode.  It’s discovered that the terrorist, John Harrison, has fled to the Klingon home world, a warrior race that is on the brink of war with the Federation. So Captain Marcus, played by Robocop himself, Peter Weller, tasks Kirk and the enterprise with tracking Harrison’s location and killing him with a long range torpedo. 

 

The clear modern analogy is drone strikes, a policy where we often ignore the sovereign space of other nations in order assassinate individuals suspected of terrorism, even if they are also American citizens.  The crew of the Enterprise is naturally uncomfortable with the idea of assassinating a Federation citizen without a trial.  Spock makes his disagreement with the assignment clear and Scotty goes so far as to stay behind rather than to be implicated in the assassination.

It’s obvious that this plot is attempting to address criticism that Abrams’s Star Trek is just dumb fun without any of the original show’s notions of philosophy. The use of science fiction to comment on contemporary politics was integral to what made the original series so memorable.  Gene Roddenberry wanted to do more than entertain; he wanted comment on the civil rights movements of the 60s.  In the end, Kirk decides to push aside his desire for revenge and captures Harrison.  I have to commend Abrams and his screenwriters for not only addressing moral quandaries surrounding terrorism, but also for clearly coming down against drone strikes.  It’s common for large blockbusters to throw in an allusion to terrorism now and then to give themselves an easy sense of gravitas, but for every film that handles the issue with intelligence (Batman Begins), there are many more films that drop the ball (The Dark Knight Rises).  In fact, I would argue that STiD is better at handling the themes of terrorism, revenge, and justice than more overtly “real world” movies like Zero Dark Thirty.  And while we will never know for certain, the film’s condemnation of assassinating our enemies would have been embraced by Roddenberry himself, who always came off as a bit of 60s radical.

 

It’s too bad, then, that the moment Kirk captures the terrorist, Harrison, the movie begins to fall apart. Fair warning: from here on out there are heavy spoilers.  I avoided all spoilers before seeing the film, but I had heard the internet whisperings that Cumberbatch would be playing Kahn, the most notorious Star Trek villain.  Well, he is Kahn.  How a Mexican pretending to be Indian in the original Star Trek universe becomes a Brit in this universe, I’ll never know (perhaps they’ll explain this discrepancy in the sequel).  Perhaps one of the most potentially exciting aspects of the first Star Trek was that Abrams and company had come up with a way of starting fresh without completely overwriting the long history of the series.  All they had to do was construct an entirely new parallel universe.  But it seems wrong headed for Abram to give himself all of this freedom, to tell the audience that we are now entering a world where anything can happen—we are not bound to continuity; this is my playground now—and then go ahead and retread characters and events from the old universe.  There are so many possibilities in the world of Star Trek. Why give us more of the same?

But wait, it gets worse.  Perhaps the most inexplicable moment in the entire film is a restaging of a famous scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but this time the characters are flipped.  Fans of the Star Trek series will almost immediately guess what scene I’m referring to: the death of Spock.  But here it is Kirk who sacrifices his life and restores power to the Enterprise.  At best, this comes across as mistaken fan service, cosplay on the big screen.  Abrams understands, rightly, that the death of Spock still has a strong emotional pull for geekdom.  So he thinks that restaging it will conjure up the same sort of emotional memories.  Instead, the scene plays out as rote.  I felt like I had to endure the death of Kirk in order for the real film to resume.  At its worst, this scene plays out as cynical miscalculation.  Abrams, unable to conjure up something new, tosses out pre-masticated remains for the public.  In my review of Super 8 (a film that has some fine moments), I said that Abrams was like a piano prodigy who can recreate the notes of a piece of music perfectly, but somehow the results are devoid of emotion.  I can think of no finer example of this than STiD’s death of Kirk. 

I don’t think Abrams understands what a disservice the death of Kirk did not only to his audience, but also to himself.  Star Trek II is such a taught, well crafted piece of entertainment that to intentionally draw comparisons between it and STiD causes the latter to suffer.  But it also shows how little Abrams understood what made the death of Spock work.  Star Trek II smartly drew on the fact that the characters were getting older for dramatic weight.  Early in the film, McCoy gives Kirk his birthday presents, including a pair of archaic looking spectacles.  Death is becoming real to these characters.  Sure, there’s element of survivor’s guilt—that these characters have survived trouncing through the galaxy while others haven’t.  But it’s also the sense that age and death catches up with us all.  This dread hangs over much of the film.  But STiD takes place when Kirk and Spock are just beginning to understand each other.  They don’t have the same history, and as young men death is not yet real to them.  In order to understand this, a director has to know not only how to stage action, which Abrams does well, but he must also know how to weave thematic weight into his narrative, which Abrams has yet to learn.

 

But despite my rant, the movie is rather enjoyable until about two-thirds of the way through.  It’s not a complete loss.  The greatest boon this new series of movies has going for it are the actors.  Abrams must get credit for assembling a great group of young actors who manage to fit their roles well.  This is especially surprising, because the single greatest aspect of the original Star Trek was the relationship between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.  It was easy to ignore the chintzy 1960s special effects when these three characters and the actors who portrayed them were on the screen.  (I still wish that Karl Urban could get more screen time as McCoy in the new series).  I sincerely hope that this crew has plenty of adventures left, and I think that one day Abrams might even become a great director of blockbuster entertainments.  Until then, I’m happy for someone else to take over for the next installment.

Iron Man 3

Iron Man 3 (4.5/5)

For most of the world, Iron Man 3 is the first Marvel film following the massively successful Avengers film.  People the world over have waited to see how Marvel will go back to focusing on a single superhero and whether it would satisfy after last summer’s superhero binge.  But for some of us Iron Man 3 is important for a very different reason.  For a few movie fans, Iron Man 3 signifies not necessarily the glorious return of a franchise superhero, but rather the reunion between star Robert Downey Jr. and director Shane Black.  You might be unfamiliar with the name Shane Black (and honestly who could forget a name like that), but you almost certainly are familiar with the movies he has scripted.  In the late eighties/early nineties Black became the highest paid screenwriter of all time.  He’s most famous for his work on Lethal Weapon and its first sequel and less famous for films like The Last Boy Scout and The Long Kiss Goodnight (although, for my money, The Last Boy Scout is entirely underrated).  His movies combined action elements popular in the eighties with a decidedly film noirish cynicism.  It was no surprise, then, when, after nearly a decade missing in action, Shane Black’s first directorial effort was a post-modern noir, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. 

It was overshadowed by the first Iron Man, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was without a doubt Robert Downey Jr.’s comeback vehicle.  It may not have reached the kind of audience that a superhero film can, but it once again proved that Robert Downey Jr. possessed impeccable comedic timing and charisma to spare.  And there’s a shared comedic sensibility between Downey and Black.  Both seem to revel in freewheeling and unexpected turns, quick wits and big egos.  And while Iron Man 3 is first and foremost a big budget summer blockbuster, both Black and Downey find enough space to fit their own oversized personalities.

There’s plenty of back story in Iron Man 3, so much in fact that a lot of information is delivered by Downey in the form of a voiceover.  The film begins at the turn of the new millennium when people were still worried about the Y2K virus and Eiffel 65’s little ditty, “Blue,” was worming its way into our hearts.  One of the central themes of the film is how decisions have long term consequences that we aren’t initially aware of, and so early on we are introduced to Maya Hansen, a genius botanist who is developing a procedure that could eventually help re-grow limbs.  We are also introduced to Aldrich Killian, played, at least in this part of the film, as socially awkward computer nerd who walks with a cane and has yet to master basic grooming techniques.  Killian makes his way onto the same elevator as Tony Stark, and he proceeds to pitch his idea for a venture capitalist start up.  In order to get rid of him, Stark promises to meet him up on the roof in a few minutes and then deliberately forgets about it.

It should come as little surprise that thirteen years later Killian the socially clumsy computer nerd has become Killian the suave industrialist.  Killian has somehow cured his limp and is macking on Tony Stark’s main squeeze, Pepper Potts.  Meanwhile there’s a terrorist on the loose by the name of The Mandarin who has been releasing mysterious footage of himself decrying Western decadence while detonating bombs across the country with impunity.  It doesn’t take much to figure out that there’s a connection between The Mandarin and Killian (but things are either more or less than they seem at first).  While following one of Killian’s henchmen, Stark’s former body guard and friend, Happy Hogan, gets himself blowed up real good, and in a fit of rage Stark calls out The Mandarin on television, even providing his home address as a challenge.

Stark’s challenge is accepted, and three heavily armed helicopters show up at Stark’s Frank Lloyd Wright inspired mansion and proceed to blow it up.  Stark narrowly escapes, and decides to play dead in rural Tennessee.  While convalescing in a barn, Stark strikes up a friendship with a precocious ten year old named Harvey.  Stark spends most of the film outside of the Iron Man suit, a smart move on the part of the filmmakers.  One of the chief problems with superhero films is that the superpowers can get in the way of the action.  We’re never quite certain how much punishment the protagonist can take and after a while watching two nearly invulnerable people pound on each other starts to lose its appeal.  This is why it’s much easier to build a movie around Batman than Superman. 

There are a number of twists and turns throughout the film, and I don’t really want to give them away.  Shane Black is a master at setting up expectations just so he can undermine them.  (Watching Iron Man 3 a year after the Avengers got me thinking that maybe Black is the progenitor of Joss Whedon.  Both really want to pull the rug out from under the audience).  A lot of Black’s personality really shines through in the film.  Like Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and A Long Kiss Goodnight, the movie takes place at Christmas (this guy loves Christmas).   Much of the dialogue consists of men exchanging quippy exchanges with one another while under nearly fatal doses of testosterone.  And Tony Stark, like Martin Riggs before him, is suffering from mental problems, a case of PTSD following the events of The Avengers.  Hell, the climax of the film even takes place at the docks.  Of course, all of Black’s personality is shrouded in the wares of the Marvel Universe, but it’s a good fit nonetheless.

The film itself isn’t perfect, exactly.  The villain’s plan is ridiculously convoluted.  There are also a number of moments where the movie attempts to sublimate our collective trauma surrounding 9/11.  Terrorism is used as a plot point, but it’s a mostly bloodless kind of terrorism that’s meant to be exciting rather than horrific.  Perhaps the most troubling moment in the film happens when Tony Stark calls out The Mandarin, claiming that he’s out for pure revenge and not politics, as if the two are mutually exclusive.  If we’ve learned anything after 9/11, we should have learned that vengeance is an extension of the political.  So the film might read as a piece of propaganda to some (which is true of most of the Iron Man movies) but to others it might be a fascinating depiction of America’s failure to fully come to grips with 9/11 even a decade out.  But purely as a work of entertainment, Iron Man 3 is the most accomplished of the series.  Where Iron Man 1 and 2 worked best during moments of comedy and only started flailing during the action sequences, Iron Man 3 balances these two modes perfectly.  It got me thinking that this whole superhero thing might have legs after all. 

The Philip K. Dick Reader

The Philip K. Dick Reader by Philip K. Dick (4/5)

One of the great tragedies of Philip K. Dick’s life is that he died shortly before Hollywood started pumping out adaptations of his work.  This means that he has become far more popular posthumously than when he was alive.  For most of his time as a sci-fi author, Philip K. Dick both lived to write and wrote to live.  He was an incredibly prolific artist who, at times, seemed to have an unending supply of ideas, but at the same time he also had to write in order to provide himself shelter and food.  This means that PKD’s naturally productive nature was bolstered by the fact that he was also forced to produce.  While PKD turned in a number of masterpieces in his time, his writing could often be hit or miss.  This makes it difficult for fans of his writing to navigate his body of work past some of the more well known novels.  PKD’s prolific nature makes it especially tough to find a satisfactory collection of his short stories.  Out of the seemingly endless collections of PKD short stories, The Philip K. Dick Reader isn’t a bad place to start.

The one thing that The Philip K. Dick Reader has going for it that many other PKD collections don’t is the fact that it includes a number of short stories that later served as the blueprints for film adaptations.  Of the stories included in the anthology, the following have been made into movies: “The Golden Man” (Next), “We Can Remember it for You Wholesale” (Total Recall), “The Minority Report” (Minority Report), “Paycheck” (Paycheck), and “Second Variety” (Screamers).  It’s a joy just to see ways in which PKD’s vision did or did not make it onto the silver screen.  After reading some of PKD’s work, for example, it becomes apparent that the dark comedy present in Paul Verhoven’s Total Recall is akin to PKD’s similarly perverse sense of humor.

But the real gems in The Philip K. Dick Reader are those stories that surprise us with their quality, the stories that manage to contain PKD’s wit and intelligence, albeit in miniature.  One of the best finds in the anthology has to be the fantastically titled, “Foster, You’re Dead!”  Like much of PKD’s work in this collection, “Foster” is a clear response to the Cold War.  But where most of his stories are interested in what happens after the bombs hit, “Foster” presents a small town on the edge of a nuclear war.  In PKD’s vision of America’s future, the government and corporations have found a way to make war work for consumerism.  Although it is not mandated, each member of the community is expected to buy their own bomb shelter, and those who don’t become outcasts.  The Foster of the title is an adolescent whose father refuses to give in to the pressures of consumerism, despite the toll it takes on his wife and son.  “Foster” showcases PKD as a brilliant observer of power and coercion.  He understands that power over individuals and groups doesn’t always come in the form of the government.  Instead, authority can manifest itself as our next door neighbors or in the form of a commercial telling us what we must do to be acceptable in polite society. 

Since most of these stories were written during the height of the Cold War, it’s not surprising how many of them take place after the fall of civilization.  But it is surprising how many variations on the post-apocalyptic narrative PKD could conjure.  In “The Turning Wheel” a devastating war has upended social order and racial hierarchy, causing the “caucs” to become the most subordinated racial caste; “The Last of the Masters” pits roving bands of anarchists against the very last organized government run by a nearly despotic robot; “To Serve the Master” presents a world where the apocalyptic past is so traumatic that it is pathologically sublimated;  and “Pay for the Printer” is a story of Marxist alienation where humanity has lost the skills necessary to produce goods and must rely on aliens to provide necessities.  It’s interesting to read PKD’s apocalyptic fiction at a time when the end of the world—thanks to an influx of zombies—appears to once again be in vogue.  But where present day stories of the end of the world are obsessed with complete and total atrophy, PKD seems more concerned with how we will carry on.  There’s a sense in his work that he believes that the world we live in—with its racial, gender, and economic inequality—is not a given, that we can transform our society for the better.  Even in his bleakest stories, PKD often betrays a sense of optimism.

Of course, not every installment in The Philip K. Dick Reader is gold.  Some of the material is just plain weird and there are a few that are kind of bad.  The story “Strange Eden” ends with a lion-like creature angrily shaking his fist at a departing spaceship, and I don’t want to even get into how PKD arrives at this scenario.  But even in PKD’s worst stories there’s a nervous energy that always propels it forward.  And his best work vacillates, often uneasily, between pulp trash and high philosophy.  His short stories can often read like thought experiments with a higher number of robots, mutants, and schizophrenics.  This tension between the high and the low is a defining aspect of PKD’s work, and instead of diluting either characteristic, the sensational somehow reinforces the high minded and vice versa. 

Foxygen - We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

Foxygen – We Are the 21^st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic (3/5)

Contemporary rock music has been decried as an anachronism in the world of hip hop and electronica, the sonic equivalent of literature’s “dead white men.”  All the trendy blogs and publications (or wannabe trendy blogs and publications) have produced at least one article attacking modern rock music for being stuck in the past.  But these same publications also happen to reward rock musicians who have an uncanny ability to ape past rock luminaries.  I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole on the subject of “originality,” but I will suggest that if you make music using a computer instead of a guitar this doesn’t make you any less indebted to those who came before you. (I’m often surprised by how much electronic dance music sounds like it could have been made fifteen or twenty years ago).  The problem with Foxygen’s album, We Are the 21^st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, isn’t that the band wears its influences on its sleeves.  It’s that the musicians have yet to figure out how to smoothly integrate their influences into a satisfying sound.

Foxygen’s songs can be divided into two camps: one, contained pop songs and two, messy rock collages.  I’ll start with their smart, bite sized tracks first, because they are the most immediately satisfying moments on the record.  The album opener, “In the Darkness,” melds the melodies of the Kinks with the horn section borrowed from Sgt. Peppers.  It’s a memorable and satisfying beginning, and it foreshadows the album’s fulcrum, “San Francisco.” (It seems as if a band like Foxygen is almost contractually obligated to name check San Francisco).  With call and response lyrics like the following, “[boy:] I left my love in San Francisco / [girl] That’s okay, I was bored anyway,” Foxygen gets to showcase some humor and suggest that the band can fit both homage and caricature into the same song. 

By contrast, Foxygen’s longer, more freewheeling songs are both more ambitious and messier.  It doesn’t help that it’s on these tracks that vocalist, Sam France, tries his best to channel his rock and roll heroes.  There’s a moment on “No Destruction” that sounds less like a shout out to Bob Dylan than it does a Saturday Night Live impression gone wrong.  At their worse, these longer songs sound like snippets of ideas haphazardly strung together without thought to transitions or continuity.  On the song, “Oh Yeah,” Foxygen splice a Jackson 5 song into the middle of a T. Rex number, a combo that should work, but here it sounds random, like they’re flipping back and forth between two radio stations.

Foxygen’s intense knowledge of rock and roll’s back catalogue is at times reminiscent of sampling in hip hop.  But where the best hip hop DJs manage to take disparate sounds that have no business inhabiting the same song and yet somehow make them sound like perfect compliments, here Foxygen takes sounds that should work together and somehow manages to make them clash.  The exception is perhaps “On Blue Mountain,” which moves from one idea to the next, taking unexpected detours when necessary, but all the while building towards something greater than its parts.  This song represents the Platonic ideal of Foxygen in practice.  Obviously, this band is talented, and they might even turn in a masterpiece if only they could harness their gifts for the greater good of rock and roll.

Soundgarden - King Animal

Soundgarden – King Animal (4/5)

            I’ll admit to more than a little trepidation when Soundgarden announced that they would be hitting the 90s nostalgia circuit and eventually release a new album.  Despite the fact that a number of classic bands over the years have in the past decade started recording new material that has actually strengthened their legacy – from Mission of Burma to Dinosaur Jr. – I still didn’t have the same hopes that Soundgarden would follow in their footsteps.  There are two seemingly contradictory reasons for this. One, Soundgarden stands as one of the most commercially and creatively successful bands from the 90s, and they arguably never put out a bad album.  Even Chris Cornell said he worried about tarnishing their legacy, and I was inclined to agree with him.  Two, by the time he, now infamously, teamed up with Tambaland for his last solo album, Cornell, who had become the most visible face of the band, had all but destroyed his goodwill.  It always struck me as odd that Cornell would sink so low.  After all, he was a principle songwriter in the band and his first solo album turned out to be strong effort.  I was content to just listen to Soundgarden’s handful of albums over and over again.

            But I’m happy to announce that all fears have been swiftly vanquished by Soundgarden’s triumphant reunion album, King Animal.  If King Animal doesn’t have the same impact as Soundgarden’s one two punch, Badmotorfinger and Superunknown, then that’s a testament to the impossible quality of those two albums than a reflection on the latest album.  In fact, listening to King Animal is a little like falling back in love with grunge music, a genre that rock radio has done its best to water down with helpings of imitators.  But the fact that King Animal handily decimates memories of Creed and Nickleback tells you all you need to know about the album.

            Unlike other grunge contemporaries, like Nirvana or Mudhoney, Soundgarden was less devout to punk.  Instead their music felt like the natural inheritors of 70s arena filling rock gods, Led Zeppelin.  But unlike some of those bands in the 70s and 80s, Soundgarden always knew to avoid excess when necessary.  At a time when garage rock is making something of a small resurgence, it’s actually refreshing to hear a band that sounds like its aiming for those sitting the cheap seats.  And there are plenty of songs on King Animal that have that epic feel, as if Thayil is conjuring a symphony out of his six strings.  During songs like “A Thousand Days Before” each band member seems completely in sync with one another until the final horn crescendo.  The album reminded me that Soundgarden really understood how to do big without tipping over into bombast.

            King Animal is also a testament to Soundgarden’s ability to paint in the corners.  While the band has always been able write pop hooks and to go heavy when necessary, they also are comfortable in the studio, adding layers to their music without diminishing its impact.  When a chorus spins around again, the band might use a slight effect on Cornell’s vocals or let the song devolve into chaos during the bridge.  There are always more details for a listener to sift through, and their ability to match an attention to detail with heavy hooks has always made Soundgarden’s music just as appropriate for your car’s stereo as it is for an expensive pair of headphones.  

That’s not to say the band hasn’t changed in the intervening years.  (Although the fact that “Non-State Actor” sounds like a caged animal trying to get free shows they’ve maintained some of their rough edges).  Cornell’s voice isn’t as piercing as it once was, even if it has held up surprisingly well.  The songs themselves sound like they were written by veterans rather than young bunks.  But instead of running from age, the band has come to embrace growing older.   Singing about wallowing in “mud and blood” and searching with his “good eye closed,” Cornell’s lyrics often had a suitably Old Testament heaviness that matched the band’s predilection for the lower end.  But here Cornell finds the space to ruminate on impending middle age.  On “Bones of Birds” he sings, “Time is my friend 'til it ain't and runs out / And that is all that I have 'til it's gone,” suggesting that Cornell is aware that everything we have, our talents, our relationship, and our lives all come with an expiration date.  Tellingly, the album closes on the song “Rowing,” which relies on the harmonies of old time work songs.  Together the band sings, “Don't know where I'm going, I just keep on rowing / I just keep on pulling, gotta row.”  And if that isn’t a perfect approach to doing what you love and living your life, then I don’t know what is.  Let’s hope it means that King Animal is just the first step in a new era for Soundgarden. 

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.