Growing Pains

This week's Album/Film of the week focuses on two masterclasses in wit and subversion from the 80s, both concerned with adolescent girls: David Leland's dramedy Wish You Were Here (1987) and Morrissey & Marr's The Smiths (1984).

Not even Ellen Page's Juno can quite prepare you for Lynda Mansell (Emily Lloyd), the heroine (or anti-heroine) of Wish You Were Here.  David Leland's film about a witty, rebellious 16 year old girl growing up in an English seaside town in the 1950s is of a kind rarely made anymore: a character study serving as a period piece that isn't about a significant historical figure, or what we call a biopic.  It's a memoir of sorts, but it's told in the third-person, where no narrator is available to tell you that what's unfolding onscreen has some sort of significance to the wise person telling the story.  Lynda is just a teenage girl with a series of tedious summer jobs she can't be bothered to keep, escalating sexual encounters, and a father who doesn't understand her.

A big part of Lynda's problem is boredom.  There just isn't much to do where she's from except go to movies with awkward boys, work at the hair salon or the food cart or whichever job it is that week, and ride up and down the boardwalk.  The other part of the problem is that her mother -- her only ally in the world -- is dead.   Her father, a civilian navy man and general prude, is concerned for her reputation, or more pressingly, his own, as she goes around town hiking up her skirt and cursing people out.  The primary source of humor in the film is her fondness for vulgarity, but even then it's tempered with irony, as vulgarity in the '50s wasn't likely to constitute vulgarity in the 80s, and it certainly wouldn't now.  Consider Lynda's trademark yet fairly innocent insult, specially reserved for her father on most occasions: "Up your bum!"

Herein lies the paradox of rebellion, for while Lynda's crudeness is certainly a cry for attention, it is also the heroic nature of an iconoclast.  In addition to her father, Leland pits his heroine against another crucial signpost of patriarchal order trying to reign in the "wild" female psyche -- that of the psychiatrist.  In one of the funniest yet disturbing scenes of the film, Lynda has to attend a session with Dr. Holroyd.  At his insistence, they begin to alphabetically chart all the curse words in the English language, until they arrive at a word that even Lynda refuses to say.  Not because she's embarrassed to say it.  But because Dr. Holroyd implores her to say it, and it seems his motivations aren't entirely professional.

The scene serves to show the ways in which the patriarchy fetishizes taboo even in its insistence on repressing it.  That is, behaviors such as Lynda's can be labelled "taboo" or "other" the better to manipulate and contro'.  This is precisely the definition of "perversion," and Lynda isn't having it.  At least not that form of perversion.

Which brings us to Eric (Tom Bell).  He is a friend of Lynda's father, meaning he's far too old for Lynda.  The rebellious side of Lynda finds him alluring for this reason, while perhaps the vulnerable side of her wants to find an intimacy that is wholly absent from her relationship with her father (another case of perversion).  Needless to say, this is where the "drama" in the "dramedy" enters to the story.  Lynda becomes a tragic figure as she bears the consequences of her relationship with Eric, but, to Leland's immense credit as a screenwriter and Lloyd's performance, at no point does she come across as a victim.  Even if she is one.

If Lynda Mansell is the girl next door smoking cigarettes in the backyard by the pool, Morrissey is the sickly boy in the window upstairs who's allergic to the sun. The Smiths, more than any other Smiths album, could've soundtracked Wish You Were Here, as it shares a similarly arch, not to mention feminine, sensibility.  Hazy flashes of nostalgia pervade the album, whether it be for the simple guitar music of the 60s that Johnny Marr dresses up in his own svelte flare, or for the startling moments of childhood introspection Morrissey references all over ("will nature make a man of me yet?").  Marr's songs, locked in alternate states of sighing wistfulness, pouting, and tempered euphoria, evoke the seaside towns of Wish You Were Here, frozen in time, caught in a timeless dance with mundaneness and kitchen sink drama.

For the most part, the songs find a perfect home in Morrissey's tales of awkward sexuality and social discomfort, but it's not like they fit hand in glove.  For one, there's an undeniable morbid streak running throughout Morrissey's rambling lyrics (see "Suffer Little Children").  The production, which both Morrissey and Marr have derided in recent years, is stark and modulated, a far cry from the more pristine sound of The Queen is Dead and even Strangeways, Here We Come.  And of course, we must talk about that voice.

Marr's guitar riff on "This Charming Man" may chime perfectly well, but to hear Morrissey wail, "I would go out tonight but I haven't got a stitch to wear" is utterly jarring, all of which is to say the song is riveting.  I imagine it was nothing less than shocking and then hilarious to hear a man who might as well be singing in the shower moan "I've lost my faith in womanhood" and take the forgone tropes of rock n' roll as sex and turn them on their heads with lines like, "She wants it now and she will not break/But she's far too rough and I'm too delicate" ("Pretty Girls Make Graves") in 1984.  If Lynda Mansell and Morrissey ever met... now that's a movie I'd watch.

100 Essential Film Performances Part 2

Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones (1954)

...And as promised, here are the essential female film performances.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/100-essential-female-film-performances/

What do you think of these selections?

100 Essential Film Performances

Paul Bettany in Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003)

Ah, this is why we love the folks over at PopMatters.  The process of retrospection and re-evaluation of popular art is of course essential in determining which tropes get carried forward into the future and which get left behind.  If it was up to PopMatters, however, nothing would get left behind.  If we witnessed it, it matters.

A year ago, they presented a list of "100 Essential Performances" from male and female actors, and they rightfully placed as much emphasis on thankless supporting roles as they did the heavyweight classics.

This year, they're republishing the list, with a slate of new performances to be added later.

Here's the list of "100 Essential Male Film Performances," broken down into a few different categories.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/special/section/100-essential-male-film-performances/

The female performances to follow.

Enjoy!

Lessons in Failure

Don't worry, this isn't a review of The Last Airbender, as that would necessitate actually seeing it.  But it is worth noting that, three duds in a row -- this one a catastrophe of proportions significant enough to end a career -- and the spectacular implosion of M. Night Shyamalan's popular art continues to enfold like a star gone nova.


Unrepentant narcissist that he is, no one seems much concerned with the question of "why?" as much as "why does he continue to get financing to make more pictures?"


As something of an amateur storyteller, however, the Shyamalan case is frightening to me because it seems it could happen to anyone.  Indeed, it's happened to a number of a widely celebrated filmmakers, from FF Coppola to Woody Allen.  This "it" refers to what I can only describe as a loss of mojo.


It's fair to say that the downward spiral, regardless of your opinion of Signs, became more pronounced with The Village.  Abandoning all notions of character and settling instead for the monochromatic grammar of "allegory," the film revealed just how tenuous Shyamalan's tendencies always were.  He could still work up a scare and conjure casually charged imagery, but in the absence of recognizable characters, the mannered, self-congratulatory artifice that lurked behind the surface of his early work, not to mention the pretense of profundity in his films' conclusions, lurched to the forefront.


Shyamalan's more recent work has been cynical enough to cast doubt on his talents in the first place, which is only fair, I think, because he's such a dick.  That said (and a number of my peers would disagree here), I thought Unbreakable and Signs, though certainly lacking the novelty of Shyamlan's debut, were pretty good pictures.  Shyamalan, it seemed to me, was genuinely interested in characters and their struggle to find meaning in some capacity of their daily lives; this was explicitly true for both the Bruce Willis protagonists in The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and Mel Gibson's patriarch in Signs.  He respected his audience enough to develop even the most minor of characters, regardless of how silly the picture's premise.  Ironically, he appeared to be very good with his actors, getting good to exceptional work from the likes of Willis, Toni Collete, and of course, Haley Joel Osment.  The respect was mutual in that the audience was willing to follow these characters to the ends of the arcs, regardless of how ludicrous or manipulative the ending.


About those Shyamlanian endings: I've always thought it a bit overly simplistic to characterize his movies as mechanical exercises solely leading up to a "surprise" ending, for the reasons I've described above, but then I am reminded of how conditioned we are as audiences to procedurals.  Just about every show on network television follows a pretty rigid template, leaving the audience little choice other than to impatiently guess who the killer is and watch the rest of the show purely to confirm whether or not they were right.  Producers understand this phenomenon perfectly, so rather than try to upset the template, they cater to the audience's need to be right.


Let's take a guy like Hitchcock, to whom Shyamalan, in his better days, was oft compared.  Didn't just about every Hitchcock film you can think of end with someone falling, or nearly falling, off of a really, really tall man-made structure?  Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur, a bell tower in Vertigo, a window in... well, Rear Window.  Clearly, he liked this idea of falling, so he used it liberally in his films.  Good for him, right?


Shyamalan certainly takes a more varied approach to his endings, but the reason his endings are more harmful than Hitchcock's is because they play on the notion that movies -- and by extension, storytelling -- are ultimately just elaborate, cruel cons, and since the ending is the last thing we remember, this is a risky approach to take.  


Of course, the revelation of the con can be immensely rewarding, as it is in The Sixth Sense, when it illuminates that which makes us so ready and willing to be conned in the first place.  That is, our greatest hopes and fears and desires are literally played out on the screen in ways we can only abstractly imagine, and with the more respectful movies, the emotional, intellectual journey is real, hokey endings and all.


Shyamalan is still working the con, except now he appears to be doing it with a kind of malice.  It's happened before: Herman Melville reeled off Typee and Moby Dick, but then he developed a terrible chip on the shoulder after the latter failed to sell through the first printed run.  His next novel, Pierre, is one of the most puzzling, ill-conceived novels of all time.  The New York Day Book published an article in with the word "CRAZY" in it to describe his downfall.  The aptly titled Confidence Man, his last novel, was equally mystifying, though not without merit.


Weezer fans know all about this phenomenon.  After Pinkerton, now widely regarded as a pop masterpiece, bombed commercially and perturbed the critics, Rivers Cuomo seemed genuinely angry at his situation and developed a chronic case of diminishing returns, troughing with the nihilistic Make Believe and coasting on a serviceable single here or there ever since.  I imagine a narcissist like Shyamalan experienced the same anger when Signs failed to convince everyone that he was the real deal, and The Village bombed.


As droves of angry moviegoers flooded the exits after experiencing the thoroughly self-deprecating yet no-less risible The Happening, I wondered to myself why I enjoyed it so much.  Some cons are executed with such impish glee that you can't help but smile and say, "OK.  You got me," even when you really, really don't appreciate it.  For even when you feel that the author is laughing at you for indulging him, it's highly unlikely that his art originates from such a place.  


When Shyamalan set out to make The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, he was also making them for himself.  Just as he was The Happening and Lady in the Water.  They are all products of the the ideas he cared about at the time that he made them.  Now if only someone could remind him that character, not genre, is his strength, he may yet get back on track...

Coffee/Album/Film of the Week

Coffee of the Week:
Espresso Blend

So here's the thing: espresso is one of the most flexible beans you can buy.  If you wanna brew coffee with it, go right ahead.  If you wanna pull shots with it, fair game.  If you wanna make iced coffee with it, it's got enough caramel notes to make it worthwhile and intriguing.  Or...

You could make iced americano!

Here's why americano on ice is better than most iced coffees you'll ever try:

It's all about body.  First of all, I highly recommend drinking your iced coffee black, it's more refreshing, and if you wanna add a little sugar (which you can do effectively by dissolving a little in hot water and pouring of the top), that's a nice touch.  The minute you add dairy, however, whether it be low fat milk or a dab of whipped cream to make a caffe olioso, things get a little heavy.  Have you noticed that?  The coffee literally doubles in weight on your tongue, and the next thing you know, you're full after 12 oz.  Ugh!

Americano on ice is a different animal entirely.  If you want, say a 16 oz. bev, that probably calls for two shots of espresso, but depending on your tolerance, you can add more or less.  Add 6 - 8 oz. of cold water, ice, and dairy extremities if you like, and you will find that you've made a light, refreshing, flavorful caffe bev that doesn't fill you up going down and has the requisite kick.

Go on.  You know you wanna try it...

Album of the week:
The Walkmen - You & Me

While we wait for the much-anticipated Lisbon due to come out later this year, we return to the sun-kissed postcard aesthetic of 2008's You & Me.

Interesting narrative arc running through the Walkmen releases.  On the first two records, they were focused on urban male ennui to mostly excellent results.  Then came A Hundred Miles Off, which you could say was the "divisive" third album, but it was not without its charms.  Whereas Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me and the excellent Bows & Arrows evoked a brooding, NYC landscape, A Hundred Miles, as the title suggests, was predisposed with travel, steeped in counter-culture Americana imagery and dry production.  There was always a rootsy side to the band, and they decided to indulge it.  Detractors found it scattered, unfocused, and something of an aural assault, as Hamilton Leithauser caterwauled his way through various Dylan poses.  All true, but compelling, I thought.  The band wasn't so much in search of an identity as ready to hop in a van and just get lost, a romantic bro-cation with maracas and Corona.

If A Hundred Miles Off was a road trip, You & Me was the return home, which isn't to say the D.C./NY band went running back to their post-punk start.  If anything, the album is even murkier and Dylanesque and waltzier than A Hundred Miles, adopting an orchestral approach to percussion and strings (guitars) that suits the warmer, lived-in vocals about returning home as a man and realizing that it doesn't exist in the way you romanticized.  The traveler is always the traveler, then, perpetually in search of a home, even as he makes his return.

Film of the Week:
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Dir. Werner Herzog

Nick Cage has given this kind of performance more often than we might recall.  You know, when it seems like his character walked off the set of another movie and stumbled into this one?  There's lots of stumbling in Bad Lieutenant.  And lurching.  And sweating.  And gun-wielding.  The difference between this and, say, Wicker Man, is that Herzog has given Cage room to create rather than flail.  The film is Herzogian in the sense that it's the lunacy of the man in relation to his environment that the director is most interested in (see Grizzly Man).  The camera is fascinated with the character and what he might do next, not the plot per se, so it follows him around, fretful that it should miss anything.  The anti-thesis of uninflected, montage filmmaking.

The role is a tailor-fit; Cage is hitting notes that another actor couldn't.  Or simply wouldn't.  And that's just it.  It's daring, it's inspired, and it's uninhibited.  Brilliant.

http://movies.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/movies/20badlieutenant.html?ref=movies

Coffee/Album/Film of the Week

Coffee of the Week:
Three Region Blend - Starbucks

While you should be wary of most Starbucks coffee, on occasion they'll offer an exclusive that gets it just about right.  Casi Celo was such a find, and now comes the Three Region Blend.   Sampling from the three coffee growing regions of the world, the blend is a little passive at worst, elegant at best.  A medium-bodied expedition, it's easy going down but provides enough cocoa/floral notes to make you feel like you've been somewhere.  The herbal touches are appropriately underplayed but do enough to counterbalance the more heavily Latin America-leaning characteristics.  Perfect late afternoon coffee.

Album of the Week:
Gotan Project - Tango 3.0

Advanced word on the latest release from the tango/downtempo trio was that it didn't go far enough in mixing up the formula.  Granted, 2006's Lunatico, with its emphasis on organic textures, rootsier arrangements, and a handful of hair-raising moments (the breakdown in "Diferente" constituting an instant classic) is a tough act to follow.


Tango 3.0 finds the trio in more eclectic territory, appropriating a wider array of genres and styles over the more coherent thesis of Lunatico.  The result is a mischievous little record with some fascinating detours; these include the ska-inflected "Desilusion" and, in the album's most surprising turn, "Rayuela," which features a children's choir, Ennio Moricone horns, and a spoken-word non sequitur.

Of course, none of this means that Gotan Project are able to avoid kitsch entirely (see the misguided "Panamericana" ), but more often than not Tango 3.0 sounds thoroughly playful... and modern.

Film of the Week:
Primal Fear (1996)

Ed Norton's performance as Aaron Stampler, a guy who may or may not suffer from a multiple personality disorder and who may or may not have killed an archbishop, is justly lauded.  It's peculiar because he's neither fully convincing as the polite, stuttering Aaron, nor as the leering sociopath "Roy" that is his other persona.  Which amounts to being wholly convincing as both, really.  And as it turns out, that is precisely the point.  The big reveal at the end may not be all that shocking, but as usual, it's the process of the getting there that matters.

World Cup M.I.A.

As the French succumbed to lethargy and then frustration against upstart Uruguay in the second match of World Cup play, it became glaringly obvious what, or rather who, they were missing.

Zinadine Zidane.

He needs no introduction.  One of the best players to ever grace a soccer field, he provided the grit, guts, and spectacular headbutt that left an indelible mark on the '06 cup.  The French displayed none of the above in their first round match.

Oh Zidane: how we miss you!  Perhaps we'll catch a glimpse of you ala Beckham at the rest of France's matches?

Coffee/Album/Film of the Week

Coffee of the week:

Bali - Matt's Coffee

I ordered a 12 oz. valve of wood-roasted Ethiopia Sidamo from Matt's Coffee, which is located in the tiny town of Pownal, ME.  I called the guy up to make sure the order went through, when he put me onto the Bali instead.  I wasn't sure at first; a great deal of coffee from Southeast Asia has an herbal spice to it that is much better for pairing with food than drinking on its own, and I've had iced coffee on the brain lately, so I wanted something with flavors tending toward the sweet and citrusy.

I lucked out.  The Bali ended up having all the notes I was looking for, and then some.  Hints of caramel, guava, and black currant make for an intriguing, well-balanced attack.

1 x 12oz Bali valve = $10.95

Album of the Week:

French Kicks - Two Thousand

This album is real pretty.

Film of the Week:

Army of Shadows, dir Jeane Pierre Melville.

Cool movie about the French Resistance, of which the director was a member.

Script Update

These have been a little hard to come by lately, it's true.  But the good news is that the script really is nearing completion, so much so that the first 30 pages or so are pretty much set in stone.  You can take a sneak peak at an excerpt on my website now, under the "Materials" section.

That Massive Sound

Fresh off the surreal Massive Attack show that went down at Terminal 5 last Thursday, I return to the record from which they played the least material, the grossly underrated Protection (1994), and brace myself for the next couple days of rain.

Protection was by no means a commercial failure.  It peaked at #4 on the U.K. charts, and the title song, graced with the divine vocals of Tracey Thorn, was a genuine hit.  The album boasts an impressive guest list of artists-famed producers Mark “Spike” Stent (U2) and Nelle Hooper (Bjork) are all over the album, while Horace Andy and Tracey Thorn both contribute vocals and compositions.  Even a young Nick Warren sits in at the mixing board.   And while it's initial impact was considerably weaker than its groundbreaking predecessor’s, history has been kind to Massive Attack's second offering.  Rolling Stone placed it on a list of ten of the “coolest” recordings of all time, thanks in large part to songs like “Karmacoma” and “Eurochild,” both hypnotic contributions from Tricky.

The album's greatest success, however, is its warm, cinematic production.  The group manages to assemble all of the musical styles on the album into one soft, looping, druggy, sensual dream.  From the reggae-tinged “Spying Glass,” the dub-heavy “Three,” to the Debussyesque “Weather Storm,”  the album eases you through a world of rain-slicked streets, snow falling past street lamps, seedy bars, and looming cityscapes.  The slow, steady beats are tucked carefully under layers of reverb, buoying the tracks rather than assaulting them (one of the ways trip-hop operates differently than hip-hop).

Two of the tracks, “Weather Storm” and “Heat Miser,” are delicate electronic instrumentals, and the rest of the album might as well be.  Even when it ventures into hip-hop, as it does on “Eurochild,” it's all atmosphere.  Tricky doesn't rap so much as breathe his tale of cultural and ethnic alienation into the mic, just barely lending his clipped accent to the unfolding noir universe.  It hardly matters what he’s saying, though once you hear him invoke the Specials with “I seem to need a reference to get residence” or “I walk in the bar and immediately I sense danger/You look at me, girl, as if I was some kind of a total stranger,” it never leaves you.  It's the best song on the album, showcasing the group’s exotic, melting-pot appeal, as well as state-of-the-art production.

Soundtracking

What do you listen to when you're writing a film about a doomed wireless operator running around Nazi-occupied Paris?

Why, The Last Broadcast by Doves, of course ;)

No, seriously, it's a great record.  I've owned it for years, but I'm just now warming to it.  While songs like "Words" and "Pounding" are rock solid pop songs in the vein of Ride, it's the short, orchestral-ambient bits that inform the proceedings with a sense of cinematic grandeur and rough-hewn beauty.

The perfect suite is the simple, folksy "M62 Song" fading into the astral "Where We're Calling From" exploding into the hallucinatory "N.Y."

Check it.

Script Update

The WWII spy "thriller" biopic has a name now -- The Calling.  I was supposed to be done with this weeks ago.  There are scenes scattered all over the place and the third act's on it's way, but it's all starting to congeal.  Finally.

What has been completed is on scripped.com, and when it's finished it'll be up on my website.  And then a movie theatre near you.

Right...?

Fascination Island update

Exciting news!  We are currently putting the finishing touches on the Fascination Island EP, which we are tentatively calling Street Level Women.  Look for tracks online soon.

Here's the (likely) Street Level Women tracklist:

1. Garden Fence
2. Dry Bones
3. Tin Hat
4. Earth Vacation
5. Fine Suit

More later...

Sophomore Slump

MGMT's Congratulations is released this week.

I've never been one to put much stock into the idea of the "sophomore slump" when it comes to pop records.  Reaction to artists' first two albums are usually wholly predicated on expectations and contexts that have nothing to do with the artists themselves (something Vampire Weekend soapbox about on Contra).  Nonetheless, there's no denying that simple saying:  "Your debut is a lifetime of experience in the making.  Your second, two years."  Something like that.

Here's what Metacritic has to say on it in light of MGMT's willfully difficult Congratulations.

http://features.metacritic.com/features/2010/best-and-worst-second-albums/

Soju Plan

Happy Hour drink of choice: A bottle of Yogurt Soju for about $20.  Light w/out being too sweet, and you can barely taste the buzz that's about to hit.

Space 212 @ 319 E 32nd St. - go after work, and the place barely looks open.  What is important is that it is open, and the staff is very accomodating.  More like a cafe than a lounge.  Club floor downstairs appropriately obnoxious late night weekends, silent for the rest of the week.

Spymistresses

Like most, I would rather watch a good film than a mediocre film.  In this case, however, I experienced a sensation most akin to relief as it became clear that the film I was attempting to get through was utterly lacking in dramatic tension, structure, intrigue, or character motivation.

The film in question is the abysmally-titled Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), a WWII drama recounting the life of one Violette Szabo, an ill-fated British spy who infiltrated France twice by parachute in an attempt to coordinate some disparate Resistance Groups.

Virginia McKenna as Violette Szabo in "Carve Her Name with Pride (1958)"

I say I was relieved because only a few months ago did I discover the existence of Violette Szabo and her powerful story and decide to try and draft a screenplay based on her life.  When I stumbled across the existence of Carve Her Name, I concertedly avoided watching it, for many reasons, one being that if it was good, I would abandon the project immediately, having no interest in making a film that would be reduced to a side-by-side comparison with another, better film.

Mostly, though, I didn't want the film to effect my dramatic decision-making process in any way.  Best to start with a clean slate, gather the research materials, and then chip away at the dramatic truth of the story as it occurred to me.

After months of research and sketching, I grew frustrated with several details of Violette's story.  Widowed by the age of 20 when her husband Etienne is killed in the African front of the war, Violette's motive for joining the war was powerful indeed.  This was a woman who dreamed only of killing Nazis, though she would never have said so.  With a two year-old daughter to care for, she had to make some interesting choices in joining the war effort in such a dangerous, secretive capacity -- as an operative for Churchill's Special Operations Executive (SOE), a clandestine outfit that engaged in covert action the CIA would blush over.

But it wasn't immediate clear what the script should be about.  Another WWII revenge fantasy script would fall squarely into the melodrama camp and is thus undesirable, but at the same time what else was there to grasp onto?  The fact that she was a young mother seemed a promising thematic area to explore; how did her instincts as a mother intersect with the grim possibility that she might have to engage in acts of extreme violence?  How did she reconcile herself to the decision to leave her daughter in the care of others while she persued a course of action so dangerous that the prospect of survival seemed highly dubious?

In my desperation to gain more insight into how these questions could be explored dramatically, I reluctantly turned to Carve Her Name.

What I discovered was surprising.  Curiously, all trace of Violette's motive for joining the SOE and ultimately giving her life in its service is missing from Carve Her Name.  Saddled with a rote a screenplay, Virginia McKenna, though blessed with quite a bit of natural charisma, gives no inidcation of the motor driving Violette to such a reckless, if brave, course of action.

This is problematized right off the bat with the script's handling of Violette's romance with Etienne, reducing it to a handful of frivilous pastoral scenes in which they talk about their future and roll in the grass.  We feeling nothing of the strong emotions these two characters puport to have for one another and instead patiently await the news that Etienne has been killed on the front.  And even when that event occurs, we get no sense of the anger or despair that afflicted Violette as she wrestled with her responsibility to her infant daughter and her unyielding desire to serve the cause against the Nazis.  Act One is scripted so mechanically that it proves distracting and cringe-worthy.

The film stumbles headlong into cliches and inanity from there.  We are forced to endure a "training montage" in which Violette learns silent killing techniques and parachuting, her dangerous information-gathering missions in France, presented with all the suspense of a Power Point, and a blazing shootout that eventually ends in her capture.

In short, Carve Her Name taught a reassuring lesson: it sure as hell isn't easy bringing history to life, especially the more obscure chapters.  And so, the book is not closed after all on the female SOE agents and just how badass they really were...

Even before forcing myself to watch the film, my attention began to turn to a more arresting SOE soul, the similarly doomed Noor Inayat Khan, a young children's book author living in England by way of France and Moscow who was descended from Indian royalty.  She would become the SOE's only channel of communication with the French Resistance as a wireless operator, leading an incredibly perilous life of evasion until the Gestapo finally closed in on her after months of close calls.

The research from the Violette Szabo project has carried over seamlessly to Noor's story, and in many ways Noor's is easier to write in three-act structure.  In fact, it's going so well that I expect to be done with a draft in about two weeks' time.  This will be an incredibly rough draft that will no doubt require tons of fact-checking and scene deletions, but at least it will be in some state of completion, something I haven't pulled off with a feature-length in some time.

Wish me luck!

Visiting "the Dead"

I forgot how much I admired Bringing Out the Dead until I watched it this week.  What struck me in particular this time around was the film's historical context.  It's as much a period piece as Gangs of New York is (and a more humane film, too).  Robert Richardson's cinematography, leaning heavily on overexposure and saturation, carefully reconstructs the aesthetic of the great television crime dramas of the late 80s and early 90s -- "In the Heat of the Night," "Law & Order," "Homicide" are just a few that come to mind.  High contrast, grainy footage characterized those productions as the gritty, "real" life dramas they were, but Richardson's work then elevates the material to the world of the spiritual, skillfully painting the streets of New York with the blackest shadows and the brightest lights.

In many ways, I should think it would be harder to recreate a period of time only ten years behind the present (the film's release was in 1999) than the more easily identifiable signposts of, say, the post-Victorian era represented in The Age of Innocence.  But Scorsese has been documenting the transformation of New York neighborhoods his entire career, so it's interesting to think of Bringing Out the Dead as a natural continuation of his life's work.

With every Starbucks and Kinkos that pops up on the corner, it's easy to take for granted that even as recently as the early 90s, New York was still very much a violent, depraved city, far from the "safest big city in the world" tag it has now.  To that end, Bringing Out the Dead is fascinating, illustrating the ways in which the city used to be so vital, thrilling, and hellish in the era of the Central Park Jogger and the crack epidemic.

The script, adapted by Paul Schraeder from Joe Connelly's book, brilliantly realizes the psychological ambiance of 4 a.m.  The act of "bearing witness" to death preoccupies the film's haunted hero Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage), an EMT who comes to see himself as a kind of death angel, someone who in actuality saves a very small percentage of the patients he responds to and is simply there to mark the passage of their souls into the next world.  One patient named Rose in particular, an asthmatic girl in her teens who dies on his watch, troubles him throughout.

Of the many qualities of Schraeder's script, one of its strongest is its allowance that Frank is delusional in this regard.  A masochist at heart, Frank does plenty of self-medicating on the job, abusing anything from Gin to shots of adrenaline to get through a long shift.  He may be suffering, but he has settled into his suffering.  After depositing a gunshot victim at the doors of Our Lady of Mercy, an unrelenting carnival of surreality that acts as the film's central locale, Mary (Patricia Aqruette), the daughter of one of the patients he's brought in, points out, "You're covered in blood."  With a kind of vacant, knowing weariness, Frank replies, "I know."  More troubling is the idea that Frank is torturing himself with ghosts of the people he couldn't save for no good reason.  As one of Rose's apparitions points out, "Suffering was your idea."  Schraeder effectively illustrates that Frank's recently-adopted world view is a coping mechanism that circumvents the fact that death is arbitrary or, worse, meaningless.  If he can attribute the death of a patient to his own bad-luck or a kind of punishment being handed by some mysterious Presence, it is somehow easier to find meaning in his job, even if it's in a perverse way.

All of this self-flagellation actually makes Frank more sympathetic.  Rather than perform his job with the same detachment as his partner Larry (John Goodman), the thrill-seeking of Tom (a crackling Tom Sizemore), or the theatrical spirituality of Marcus (Ving Rhames), Frank's personal investment in offering some kind of closure to patients and their families make him a worthy avatar through which we experience the frights of urban decay.  He seems to be the only EMT who is aware that human lives and all their associated costs are at stake.

Thus, his attachment to Mary.  As her father see-saws between life and death, Frank feels compelled to try and look out for her, offering her rides to and from the hospital in the ambulance, offering up slices of his pizza, and checking on her father's condition whenever he can.  As she details her tortured relationship to her father, she asks him, "Do people usually just spill their guts out to you like this?" and he replies, "Yes, something about my face... my mother always said I looked like a priest."

While Mary and Frank seem too damaged to participate in any kind of meaningful relationship, one of my favorite scenes in the film reveals a little glimpse of their connection without a word passing between them:  Just the two of them riding in the back of the ambulance on their way to the hospital, grateful to be in the presence of the other's company, even if they have nothing to say.  On paper, Frank and Mary helping each other through what amounts to three days of insanity (beginning on a Thursday night, the better to invoke the Passion) might not seem like a worthwhile arc, and at times it comes off as stilted, but in the hands of masters like Schraeder and Scorsese, their relationship, no matter how understated, offers a welcome reprieve from the unrelenting violence of Frank's world.

The soundtrack is exceptional.  Choosing from a slightly more up-to-date rock pantheon than usually appears in Scorsese's films, Scorsese manages to finesse the line between diagetic and non-diegetic music while nailing the pathos of the film at the same time.  We can readily imagine R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" coming over the ambulance radio in the early 90s, or the Clash's "Janie Jones" on the classic rock station, but Johnny Thunders' "You Can't Put Your Arms Around a Memory" and Van Morrison's recurring "T.B. Sheets" underscore Frank's soul-sickness.

Cage, who at that point in his career seemed satisfied with churning out silly action movies (The Rock, Con Air), offers up dynamic performance in Dead, ably navigating material that veers wildly from the humorous to the insane and beyond.  Mostly, though, it is a humble performance, allowing room for the vivid supporting actors to flourish, among them an almost unrecognizable Marc Anthony, and it's refreshing to be reminded of what Cage can do with compelling material.

Interestingly enough, Bringing Out the Dead is not included in Schraeder's unofficial "Night Worker" installment, which began with Taxi Driver (which Dead most resembles narratively and aesthetically), and continued with American Gigolo, Light Sleeper, and most recently 2007's The Walker.  Dead is better than all but one of those films in Schraeder's installment, and Frank Pierce is easily the most redeemable night worker in this lineage.  Perhaps this is precisely the reason it's left out:  Unlike Schraeder's more nebulous low-lives, we acutely sense that there is hope for Frank.

New Website

My new website is finally up and running, drop by and take a look.

http://www.bccarter.com/

Cheers,

B

New Smoosh Song

Man, these girls can play... and write.  Check out the new song "We are our own lies" from girl-band wonder Smoosh, off their forthcoming album.  It's a considerably more dramatic piece than anything they've tried before. Hey, they're all grown up!

They're playing like best of REM at 35 Cooper, it's real emotional and timeless in here...

Huge Loss for the Pop World Today

Fashion designer Alexander McQueen has been found dead at his London home.  No details on a potential cause of death.  He was 40 years old.


McQueen had worked with some of the most innovative, visually engaged pop artists of the last four decades, including Bjork, David Bowie, and more recently Lady Gaga.  His interest in technology, performance, narrative, and design garnered wide-spread acclaim across industries.

McQueen designed the iconic album cover for Bjork's Homogenic (1997)

In an era when the visual component of pop music -- which, despite purist moaning, has been with us since the birth of rock n' roll -- is decreasing in relevance and power, McQueen's death spells out a whole other layer of meaning for those of us who didn't even know him and is all the more sad.

Alexander McQueen

Snow in New York

Going sledding in Prospect Park with a friend of mine (completely her idea, can't take any credit for it)!

What's your favorite indoor or outdoor activity when the snow's falling?

New EP coming soon

Something you didn't know about me: I am one half of a psych-electro project called "Fasc!nation Isle," we will be introducing ourselves to the world via EP in the coming months...

That's all for now :)