Parquet Courts - Light Up Gold

Parquet Courts – Light up Gold (5/5)

Parquet Courts are torn between the twin pulls of chaos and order.  Lead vocalist, Andrew Savage, bounces like an electron around the stable nucleus of guitar, bass and drum.  Despite the rigid tightness of their playing, the music of Parquet Courts can’t help but sound a little unhinged.  And rather than having these competing directions take away from each other, somehow they form a complimentary sound.  Parquet Courts’s debut albums, Light up Gold, showcases a band that has arrived fully formed, a band who has so clearly internalized its influences that, when filtered through an album this great, the sounds of the past immediately come out invigorated. 

Light up Gold relies on Parquet Courts’s striking dynamic.  Borrowing from early Pixies and Pavement, many of the songs take on the appearance of an unfinished puzzle, allowing the listener to fill in the missing pieces.  At the same time, the band has perfected the disciplined, ironic tone of bands like Devo and Talking Heads.  You can never quite take Parquet Courts at face value.  In fact, the band excels at crafting an absurdist personality from the beginning.  On the track, “Stoned and Starving,” the Savage sings, “I was reading ingredients /
Asking myself ‘should I eat this?’ / I was so stoned and starving,” before listing off all of the possible foods he might consider ingesting.     

But this slacker aesthetic belies the bands impressive musical and lyrical craft.  On “Careers in Combat,” a cousin of the Clash’s “Career Opportunities,” the band takes on the persona of a well intentioned elder, listing off jobs that no longer exists—“There are no more summer life guard jobs / There are no more art museums left to guard”—Parquet Courts manages to accomplish what their peers of all stripes have largely failed to do: address the Great Recession with wit and insight.  Parquet Courts interrogate the current generation gap, America’s crumbling infrastructure, American adventurism abroad, and the nation’s unsure future, and they manage to do so within the span of little more than a minute.  Parquet Courts brilliantly deliver their lyrics from the point of view of a concerned but condescending baby boomer, offering advice about how to survive in a wrecked economy that his generation just happened to help wreck.  And tellingly, a high percentage of the disappearing jobs listed, like park rangers and art museum guards, are in public service.  The fact that there are “still careers in combat life” paints a picture of a nation without the will to invest in itself but still eager to engage in foreign wars. 

As the title of their second song, “Borrowed Thyme,” suggests, Parquet Courts are intrigued by wordplay.  In fact, they’re one of the few modern bands whose lyrics give you something to loll over in your mind.  In “A Borealis Lit Fjord,” Parquet Courts announce their love of language, singing “My girl’s a familiar looking rash / My girl’s my secret stash” before explicitly stating to the listener “You’ve been getting lots of similes.”  It’s this smart, self-conscious aspect of Parquet Courts that makes it worth returning to their music again and again.  Light up Gold is such a densely packed treasure that I doubt we’ll have a better debut album this year.  The only problem with coming out of the gates this strong is that it puts a lot of pressure on the sequel, but somehow I don’t think that’s a problem Parquet Courts need worry much about.  

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie

Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie (4/5)

A creative writing instructor of mine once said, “Those who write poetry tend to love people, but those who write fiction tend to hate people.”  According to him, because a novel has to put its characters through so many obstacles, a novelist has to have a streak of sadism.  Perhaps it’s because Sherman Alexie is also a consummate poet that his love for his characters always shines through his fiction, especially in his first short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and his first novel, Reservation Blues.  It seems a little strange, then, that Alexie chose a serial killer as the subject matter for his second novel, Indian Killer.  This seemed like particularly dark subject matter for an author whose writing can be laugh out loud funny.

Indian Killer spans a number of different characters whose paths constantly criss-cross, but they all orbit around a series of violent murders in Seattle by a perpetrator dubbed “The Indian Killer.”  The Indian Killer gets his name because he stalks, murders, and scalps his victims and then leaves behind two owl feathers.  The plot seems like it might belong to those modern day dime store novels, the airport paperback.  And while Alexie indulges in elements of the thriller—there are tense scenes where we don’t know whether the killer will get his victim or not all written, like the point of view shot at the beginning of Halloween, from the perspective of “the killer”—he is far more interested in how these acts of violence are read by and acted upon by the residents of Seattle.  Four hundred years of racial resentment and anger between whites and American-Indians boil over thanks to these murders.

If there is a main character, then it is the absurdly named Native-American, John Smith, who was adopted by a wealthy, well-meaning white couple from Seattle.  As John grows up, he becomes increasingly alienated from his white parents.  Despite the fact that his parents have the means to send him to college, John takes on a job in construction after graduating from high school, but even in this environment he’s an outsider.  It’s hard not to read descriptions of John’s awkward interactions with people—his inability to read others and strange social maneuverings—and not think about autism.  Alexie appears to be using mental development disorders as a sort of metaphor for cultural estrangement.  As an Indian raised by white parents, John belongs to a culture of one.

In addition to John, the other central native character is Marie, a Native-American activist and college student.  While the murders are happening, Marie, an English major, is taking a course on Native-American literature by an anthropology professor, Dr. Mather.  Mather is a white native sympathizer, who prides himself on his enlightened attitude towards American-Indians, but becomes increasingly incensed when Marie consistently challenges his notions about native cultures because he lacks an experiential component.  For Marie, Mather’s knowledge is suspect because he has never really lived on the rez. 

Mather is affecting a kind of passing (he loves to mention that he has been adopted by Native-American tribes), and this passing is echoed by another character, Jack Wilson, a mystery writer who holds onto a historically suspect idea that one of his ancestors may have been a famous Seattle Indian.  Wilson, who used to be a police officer, writes mystery paperbacks about a Native-American, Aristotle Little Hawk, who also happens to be a private detective.  Wilson engages in representations of Native-Americans that Alexie hopes to disfigure with his literature.  Alexie describes the love plot of the average Aristotle Little Hawk novel in the following manner: “A beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk in each book, although he was emotionally distant and troubled.  The beautiful white woman fell in love with Little Hawk because he was emotionally distant and troubled.”  But even as Wilson gives in to Native-American tropes, unable to break out of a narrative that has been building for four hundred years, he is also naively well-meaning.  He wishes to honor what he sees as his own Native-American ancestry, even though he is blonde and blue-eyed.

Much of the novel allows for Alexie to play with notions of identity.  The anthropology professor, Dr. Mather, seems to be an attack on academics who would unravel notions of authenticity.  Often these academics tend to come from wealthy or middle class backgrounds and are more interested in abstract notions of race than in the day to day material experience of minorities in America.  Likewise, Wilson wants to have race both ways.  He wants the benefits of a white experience while also holding onto an ersatz native background that legitimizes his occupation of native lands.  Marie’s angry and exasperated attack on those who don’t fully understand Native-American experience in the 20^th/21^st century seems to be Alexie’s way of pushing against these condescending liberals.  But on the other end of the spectrum, there is Truck Schultz, a conservative radio personality that represents America’s bigoted id.  Unlike Wilson and Dr. Mather, Truck is explicitly anti-Indian, and his radio program keeps dredging up racist discourse from centuries past.  For Alexie, these are the twin poles of misguided white beliefs about Native peoples.

Even though the novel goes to some violent and dark places, Alexie never fully lets go of his sense of humor.  He once referred to the book as a “feel good novel about interracial murder.”  And you get a sense that Alexie really cares for his characters, even for those whom he disagrees with.  Still, this creates a somewhat uneven tone for the entire book.  If Indian Killer is less successful than Alexie’s earlier work, it is because he is pushing his craft forward.  Maybe he will develop a streak of sadism, yet.

Before Midnight

 Before Midnight (5/5)

The Before films never previously dealt with relationships.  Or at least they never dealt with the day in, day out labor of maintaining a relationship over the course of years.  Before Sunrise lovingly details the opening stages of romance, and Before Sunset reignites this relationship while including the added pressures of growing older.  Before Midnight, then, is the first of this series to actually investigate how Jessie and Celine might function as a married couple entering into middle age together. 

As its impossibly gorgeous European locale, Before Midnight takes Greece.  Jessie has been invited to a kind of summer writers program at the home of a Grecian author.  Jessie’s son from his first marriage, Hank, has spent his summer in Greece with Jessie and Celine.  The film’s opening sees Jessie sending Hank back home, and it captures the nice dynamic between an inarticulate early teen and his loquacious father.  Jessie keeps on trying to engage his son in conversation, but Hank doesn’t bite, and you start to think that maybe the relationship between the two is strained.  But before passing through security, Hank blurts out that this has been the best summer of his life.  Jessie returns to Celine and their twin blonde headed moppets who are waiting outside the airport, but it is clear that the geographical divide between he and his son weighs on Jessie, a problem that has subtly torn at Celine and Jessie’s relationship.

Like the two prior films, Before Midnight could easily have been produced as a stage play.  The film can be divided into at least four distinct parts: the drive home from the airport, the Grecian dinner party, the walk to the hotel, and the confrontation at the hotel.  In each section, the camera maintains long shots that hold for what I would imagine are at least ten minutes at a time.  The drive home appears to be nearly one long shot.  But Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have developed such charisma and so easily inhabit these characters that their back and forth creates a kind of suspense.  We wish to know what each character will say next. 

The movie’s fulcrum is a playful dinner scene where several generations of diners discuss the possibilities and permutations of relationships.  A twenty-something couple who are clearly infatuated with each other at the same time deny that monogamy is even possible.  A couple, around the same age as Jessie and Celine, clearly takes a cynical view of their relationship and never really take it seriously.  The elderly host, meanwhile, speaks to the necessity of always being two in a relationship, of never fully melding your identity with that of your husband or wife.  In one story that’s bandied about, a guest recounts a lengthy autobiography/letter left behind by her grandmother where her husband only takes up a grand total of a few pages.  For this woman, her female friends were the relationships she truly cherished. 

The entire film culminates with a confrontation in a hotel room.  As a present, Jessie and Celine were given a hotel room for the night so that they could get away from their two daughters and have a romantic evening.  This eventually results in a truly epic fight.  But on their walk to the hotel, the two engage in the kinds of conversations that we have come to expect from these two.  At the same time it is clear that after nine years, these little tete-a-tete’s have become increasingly rare.  After reaching the hotel, their romantic evening is stymied by an argument that begins with an off handed comment Jessie made earlier about wanting to move back to the States in order to be closer to his son, a comment which resulted in a number of subtle and not so subtle jabs by Celine over the course of the day.  But soon the argument veers off in a number of directions, building on nine years of issues left unresolved. 

 

Perhaps the closest cinematic equivalent to the blow up between Celine and Jessie is the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf?  But despite the level of anger and the deep wounds Celine and Jessie inflict on one another over the course of this argument, it never quite veers into the bleak cynicism of Wolf.  Burton and Taylor’s characters love seemed to manifest only when they were tearing at one another.  It knew no other form.  We know that Celine and Jessie are capable of transcending all of the every day difficulties of life.  Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater also manage to stage the fight in such a way that it veers from raw to humorous.  A combatant might spew an argument ending decree only to come back with an “And another thing…”  The filmmakers are also careful to take the complaints of disappointments and unmet needs seriously.  Neither character is fully right nor wrong.  When Celine engages in a typical feminist argument that she is burdened with the childcare, we might not fully agree with the degree of her claims.  But at the same time it’s clear that Jessie is attempting to position her as the irrational female.  No doubt, there is some truth in Celine’s critique that sexism affects their relationship.

Before entering the hotel, Jessie and Celine sit by the Mediterranean watching the sunset.  Jessie narrates the sun’s disappearance over some seaside cliffs: “Still there. Still there. Still there. It’s gone.”  The fight in the hotel room is at times so mean spirited, so vicious that it could easily be the end.  Their relationship might one day be there and the next gone.  And like the previous two films, things end somewhat ambiguously.  We are not given full closure on the story of Jessie and Celine, because as an audience, we must leave before their narrative is truly over.  But call me an optimist, because I think these two will stay together long into old age.  Despite it all, they are just too interesting together to break up. 

It’s hard to overstate what the trio of Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater have accomplished with the Before Trilogy.  Each successive movie only deepens these characters.  And the themes have become more nuanced, more multifaceted with time.  If Before Midnight isn’t the most enjoyable of the three movies (and that’s not to say it is ever dull), it is perhaps the best of the trilogy.  My guess is that Midnight marks the end of this series, but without a doubt the relationship between Jessie and Celine lives on in the minds of their fans.  The characters seem to live outside of the screen. 

Before Sunset

Before Sunset (5/5)

In the song, “Periodically Double or Triple lead singer of Yo La Tengo, Ira Kaplan, opens with the line, “I’ve never read Proust/Seems a little too long.”  In this bit of understatement, Kaplan touches upon the sacrifices of time.  We only have so many years, so we must make certain decisions about what we will and will not do to fill up those years.  It’s no coincidence that Proust himself was concerned with the paradoxes of time.  The past, in Proust’s work, is always in a dialectic relationship with the present—that is, it never leaves us and it is always filtered through the now.  Of course, I’ve never actually read Proust.  As Kaplan suggested, it seems pretty long.  I’ve made the decision that, at least up until now, I don’t want to invest my time in Proust.  And yet, at the same time I would genuinely feel sorry for someone who hasn’t read The Great Gatsby, Catch-22, The Sound and the Fury, Slaughterhouse Five, Moby Dick, The Sun Also Rises, along with a whole host of other classics before his or her time is up.  So we all must make choices.

I bring all of this up because the movie Before Sunset is all about the passage of time and how the choices we make preclude certain avenues in our lives.  Taking place nine years after the events of Before Sunrise, Sunset reunites Jessie and Celine, two young lovers who had spent a single night together in Vienna before vanishing from each others’ lives.  Jessie has written a book, the plot of which suspiciously echoes the events of Vienna, and because his press tour takes him through Paris, he has one more chance to walk around a beautiful European city conversing with Celine about life, the universe, and everything.  But this time there’s even more of a time constraint.  Jessie has to leave in an hour and a half if he wants to catch his plane.  The choice to limit the amount of time Jessie and Celine spend together and to shoot the film in real time only further stresses the finite nature of the moment and the importance of the decisions we make.

Naturally, nine years have changed Jessie and Celine.  Jessie finds himself in a damaged marriage with a son whom he adores but a wife whom he never really loved.  Celine works in an environmental non-profit, but she has never fully committed to any single relationship over the years.  In many ways these two characters are immensely successful for their age.  Celine might still worry about the state of the world, but she works for a company that makes real changes.  Jessie has published a book that is potentially successful enough to warrant a promotional engagement at Shakespeare and Company.  And yet in their personal life they’ve found a nearly inexplicable lack.  The question, of course, is if they hadn’t parted nine years ago, would they feel this way?

At one point, Celine says, “Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”  There’s a sense throughout the film that both Jessie and Celine have romanticized their night together as a means of avoiding their present day problems.  Their night in Vienna has become, in its own peculiar way, preserved in amber, and any relationship since then has to compete with that refraction of a memory.  This dialogue with the past occurs throughout the film, and I myself had a similar situation watching this film.  When first watching it many years ago, I thought the movie was about how people become disillusioned as they get older, but upon multiple viewings since, I now think it’s about how questions of what could have been can seem like an escape pod for whatever presses upon us in the now.  Even Celine claims, “Maybe we would have hated each other eventually.”  Celine and Jessie want the relationship they had nine years ago, but they don’t want to necessarily put in the work.  In fact, over the years the characters have become more romantic.  In the first film, they had to fight against their 90s cynicism, but here they are more open to the possibilities that finding the right person can fix what’s wrong with their world. 

The principle characters involved with this film have really done the impossible.  They have made a sequel that is arguably deeper than the original (and I say this as someone who whole heartedly loves the original).  But what’s more, Sunset complicates its predecessor.  Hollywood cinema is filled with movies about couples who meet, overcome obstacles and fall deeply in love.  But no one, it seems, wants to engage with the long term consequences of monogamy.  Sunset only touches upon some of these issues (which they will hopefully get to in the third chapter), but it does present us with something that’s incredibly rare in American cinema: two likable, engaging people genuinely dealing with growing older and understanding the impact of life’s choices.

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.