Mini-Reviews for February 20 - 26, 2017

It's Oscar weekend! I posted this on my Facebook, but just in case anyone's interested and missed it there, here are my Oscar preferences—it's not that I think all of these will happen, but if I were in charge of the show, here would be my picks from among the nominees (at least for categories I've seen enough from to have an opinion about). Feel free to share your own picks, too.

Of course, if you're just here for the reviews, it won't hurt my feelings to just slide on past.

Best Picture: Moonlight
Actor: Casey Affleck
Actress: Ruth Negga
Supporting Actor: Mahershala Ali
Supporting Actress: Michelle Williams
Animated Feature: Kubo and the Two Strings
Cinematography: Arrival
Costume Design: La La Land
Directing: Moonlight
Documentary Feature: O.J.: Made in America
Editing: Arrival
Original Score: Moonlight
Original Song: "How Far I'll Go"
Production Design: Hail, Caesar!
Animated Short: "Piper"
Sound Editing: Hacksaw Ridge
Sound Mixing: Arrival
Visual Effects: Kubo and the Two Strings
Adapted Screenplay: Moonlight
Original Screenplay: Hell or High Water

Movies

Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
Large portions of this movie consist of parades of tired war-movie cliches, particularly in its battle scenes, which very much read like director Mel Gibson really loved both the gruesome nightmare of Saving Private Ryan's Normandy beaches sequence and the cool stylization of his own action movie pedigree. But when this movie focuses most on its protagonist, the Medal-of-Honor-decorated Desmond Doss, it's much more successful, both in the early scenes of Doss's hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the climactic scene were, unarmed, he pulls more than seventy wounded human beings (both Allied but also Japanese) from a battlefield over a single torturous night. It's during that latter sequence in particular, in which a broad but ultimately effective Andrew Garfield (0 for 2 for exaggerated accents in 2016, unfortunately) depicts one of the most unambiguously good deeds in American war history, where the film gains its power, and by golly, when it happens, it's worth being moved to tears. Grade: B

Jauja (2014)
The combination of dialogue absurdity, light slapstick humor, out-of-nowhere third-act setting change, and languishing when-will-they-end-lengthy shots of gorgeous landscapes makes Jauja a conceptually interesting film, for sure, and a welcome, all-too-rare attempt to move the western out of its myth/realism spectrum. But it certainly isn't much fun to sit through, and I'll be darned if, interesting as it may be in theory, I can make heads or tails of what it's trying to accomplish beyond bewilderment. Grade: B-

Margaret (2011)
Banking on its reputation, I skipped the theatrical release and went straight for the extended, 3-hour cut. My gut tells me that I've done the right choice; perhaps attempting to create a new subgenre—the indie epic—writer/director Kenneth Longergan has crafted a film in which seemingly superfluous detail and the recounting of every specific of its characters lives (both mundane and spectacular) become vitally important in weaving a complex, fascinating, and often frustrating tapestry of the film's reality, so every minute counts as much as every other minute feels like it should have been cut. Beginning with its most conventionally exciting setpiece, in which our protagonist, Lisa (Anna Paquin), plays a small role in causing a fatal bus accident, the rest of the film's meandering hours play out as a strange traipse through the various collage of trauma, guilt, self-righteousness, and growth Lisa experiences in the aftermath. What makes this an effectively sprawling movie instead of a tedious one has to fall both on Longergan's writing, which does great work making almost all of its scenes zing with both hilarity and high emotion, and Paquin's absolutely stunning performance as the 17-year-old Lisa. I really can't overstate just how good Paquin is here. Lisa is temperamental, selfish, delusional, sensitive, moralistic, convicted, and short-sighted—essentially, a high schooler—and Paquin plays her with an astounding lack of glamour, an infuriating yet sympathetic ball of human life. In fact, the film's no-nonsense approach to its adolescent character in general is brilliant; rarely have teenagers been so thoroughly teenaged in a movie. So the fact that the movie's by-design sprawl doesn't always coalesce into a worthwhile whole is more than made up for by the minute-to-minute pains and pleasures of this sort of sharply observed reality. Grade: A-

Fish Tank (2009)
While it's never quite the audio/visual tour de force of last year's American Honey—writer/director Andrea Arnold is on her home UK turf in this feature, likely accounting for the straight-faced realism here in place of American Honey's mythic sublime—Fish Tank is nevertheless as tense as this kind of naturalistic indie tends to get. An abduction sequence near the end of the film verges on horror, in fact. Not knowing much about inner-city London, I can't say if the realism here has the compassion and verisimilitude of Arnold's later work, but its attention to detail and the not-so-quite desperation of its characters is both fascinating and humanistic, finding the spark of life within even bleak circumstances. Grade: B+


Music

The Rolling Stones - Beggar's Banquet (1968)
Of the Stones' four undisputed masterpieces—the remarkable streak of consecutive releases that includes this one, Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed, and Exile on Main St.—Beggar's Banquet is by-far the weakest. Mick Jagger's affectation of regional accents rarely works, and it definitely doesn't in goofy country songs like "Dear Doctor," and that's only the worst song with an unsuccessful affectation. But honestly, this is a nitpick and only a "weak" album by the rubric of the Rolling Stones' even better peak work, which is totally an unfair rubric to hold any artist, even the Stones. Besides, this one's got its share of classics, from "Jigsaw Puzzle" to "Street Fighting Man" to "Salt of the Earth" to the undeniable, unassailable, stone-cold ownage of freaking "Sympathy for the Devil," which, as far as I'm concerned, is on its own the definitive argument-ender for any debate of the Rolling Stones as all-time greats. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for February 13 - 19, 2017

Last week, I had more negative reviews that I think I've ever hard. Well, this week, I'm pretty sure I have a higher concentration of A reviews than I've ever had. A nice turn of events, to be sure.

Movies

Passion (2012)
This relatively typical Brian De Palma erotic thriller is almost dumb enough to work. Almost. There's an admirable straight-facedness to the silliness here that might read a little more readily as deadpan if De Palma were just a tiny bit nuttier with his style—we've of course got a split-screen segment, and Rachel McAdams in villain mode is something I wasn't aware I needed so badly. But in between the fireworks, the film is just kind of dull and tepid, making at least 75 percent of the movie generic trash (and not the good kind). Grade: C+

Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
As a musical about the survivor of a botched sex-change operation in East Germany, the film has plenty of poignant and surprising things to say about gender identity and the specifics of Hedwig's experience. However, the biggest success of the film is that it's music is comprised entirely of glam rock songs that really and truly rock. I've seen my fair share of musicals that attempt to exist within rock aesthetic—from Memphis to Hairspray—and often, the truth is that it's only rock in the vaguest of touches, instead sticking closely to native show tune archetypes. Not so with Hedwig, whose songs sound everything like the peers of Lou Reed, David Bowie, and T. Rex in the early '70s, only if all of those artists had collectively decided to eschew any semblance of coyness and innuendo and instead gone right for the sexually explicit melodrama. It's all delightfully funny, raucous, and full of feelings—likely the greatest crop of songs in a 21st-century film yet, animating a truly great 21st-century film. Grade: A

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
At the risk of seeming foolish through absolutist statements, Taxi Driver is the most spiritually bereft of any work by the legendarily spiritual Martin Scorsese. Maybe this is (along with its troublesome social subtext) why it's the only acclaimed Scorsese that I've never really felt much about. So imagine my joy upon discovering that, among other things, Bringing Out the Dead is a sort of corrective to the aspirituality of Taxi Driver. Set in the same (albeit two decades removed) New York underbelly, populated by much the same cast of misfits, criminals, destitutes, social outcasts, the movie again stars a man obligated to roam the city nightlife and pick up strangers—this time, he's driving an ambulance, and that redemptive role, rather than the purgatorial taxi, seems to have made all the difference. Bringing Out the Dead is practically ecstatic in its spirituality, and the line between here and hereafter has never been so porous in Scorsese's work: everywhere, the streets are haunted by the memories (but come on, we know [heck, we're told] they're ghosts) of those souls lost under the watch of Nicolas Cage's ambulance driver. The dead walk and talk, and even the living speak openly of of Jesus, imbuing something as profane as the revival of a heroin overdose with implication of holy resurrection. And then there's the final shot, which is, for all intents and purposes, the spitting image of a Renaissance devotional image. I don't know why people don't talk about this one more; it's one of Scorsese's masterpieces. Grade: A

Whisper of the Heart (耳をすませば) (1995)
It's minor Studio Ghibli fare, lacking the depth of texture and wonder that characterizes the studio's best work. But minor is far from bad, and Whisper of the Heart is a savory little slice-of-life film, chronicling a low-stakes but heartfelt coming of age. I love how small everything is: the story, under most circumstances, would have been a micro-budget live-action indie, but under director Yoshifumi Kondo (his sole director credit before his death in 1998), it's languished over in lavish detail that brings its myriad poignancies and trivialities to life. Like I said, it's not among the studio's best—a few last-minute gestures ring a little false, stretching the smallness a bit too much—but it is the sort of modest work that it seems only Ghibli would put out with this care. Grade: B+

Ordet (1955)
Ordet is, to vaguely spoil its simple plot, a film about recontextualizing the idea of a miracle. Set in that ever-fertile environment for religious dialogue, postwar Europe, the movie focuses intently on the problems of modernity and science within Christian supernatural belief. Characters grapple with God's silence; they experience crushing hardship; they stare in horror at the abyss of losing belief—this is about 90% of the film before the humble yet powerful insertion of the supernatural into this context. In doing so, Ordet is able to simultaneously set its story within a rational, mid-century perspective that wouldn't feel out of place within one of the more cynical post-belief Bergman films or any number of the "death of God" European art films from the '50s and '60s and also preserve its supernatural underpinnings as legitimately supernatural and not just a convenient quirk of the film's world. If you've been raised in Christianity and read the Bible at all, you'll know the tendency for the stories of miracles to take on a mundane quality through sheer repetition ("Well, of course Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, I know that already"). Ordet, then, with its viciously realist, doubting setting, becomes a compelling reminder of the sheer wonder of the miraculous that I think we've lost through our familiarity and distance from the events depicted in scripture. The result is one of the most beautiful and affirming ruminations on faith I've ever seen committed to film. Grade: A

Music

Foxygen - Hang (2017)
We could use more glam in what's left of the indie rock scene, so it's a nice evolution to have Foxygen, former Velvet Underground torchbearers, follow in Lou Reed's footsteps toward poppier, more theatrical ground. With the lush strings and chamber pop production, though, Lou Reed probably isn't the best point of reference anymore; "Follow the Leader" feels a bit like a T. Rex strut, while the singalong "Avalon" has the hallmarks of a great Queen track. And that's just the opening two songs. It's not groundbreaking music, but, especially after the double-album dud, ...And Star Power, it's lively, boisterous, and, most of all, lots of fun. Grade: B+

The Men - Leave Home (2011)
The debut by prolific punk rockers The Men has all the mean ferocity of the band's best work with little of the spacey fluff that's padded out some of their more recent releases. The first song, "If You Leave..." is sedate and fuzzed out, the weakest track here, but don't let that fool you; track two, "Lotus," with its "ONE TWO THREE FOUR" count off and subsequent guitar theatrics, kicks the album into a high gear it seldom leaves and often betters later on, particularly in the scorching mid-album duo, "L.A.D.O.C.H." and "()." It's solid, high-energy punk throughout and worth checking out if you're looking for that sort of thing. Grade: B+

Mini-Reviews for February 6 - 12, 2017

One-day work weeks are the best. It makes me feel better about the fact that this post has more negative reviews than I think any other post I've made so far.

Movies

Deadpool (2016)
Of all the myriad things I can be thankful for, I now realize near the top must be the merciful blessing that this movie did not come out during my high school years and thus subject me to months and even years of having to hear this film's smarmy, self-impressed vulgarisms repeated from the mouths of my peers. Rather, I merely have the choice to endure this film's 108 minutes of juvenilia once, which is quite enough. I'm not sure if it's an indictment of the modern superhero blockbuster that a movie with all the flaws of the genre's most pedestrian works can feel fresh to so many by merely slapping on some R-rated violence, profane dialogue, and the flimsiest of metacommentary, but it sure isn't a ringing endorsement for the health of the form. Grade: C

Manchester by the Sea (2016)
The crushing sadness of Manchester by the Sea's shaggy plot would be suffocating if it weren't for the film's idiosyncratic and often gut-busting sense of humor—it's not black humor specifically, at least not in the satirical sense that the term often connotes. Rather, the jokes here are the only joy that our characters can find in the spaces surrounding the death of a family member and a whole host of other experiences and memories I can only assume would be absolute hell to live with. I'm being a bit vague here because the movie seems to want the specifics of these characters' lives to read as surprising reveals within the film's tightly edited flashback structure, so for now, just know that while the tragedy here would be bleak by any sense of the word, the movie itself is not bleak. That's not to say it's uplifting either--this is just life that Manchester by the Sea depicts, with all its little moments of connection and pain. It no doubt helps that every actor here—even Matthew Broderick, in a somewhat ill-conceived tangent from the film's generally rough-around-the-edges, working-class sensibilities into Christianized suburbia—play human beings of such vigor and life that there's no way not to care for every person onscreen. Grade: A-

Loving (2016)
The better of Jeff Nichols's two 2016 films is also the more grounded—literally, as it turns out. Instead of Midnight Special's multi-dimensional-alien sci-fi, Loving gives us a tender and altogether moving portrait of the couple whose Supreme-Court-decided lawsuit ended all laws prohibiting marriage on racial grounds. A lesser (or at least a less poignant) movie may have focused obsessively on the injustices the Lovings face and the legal procedure that lead to eventual justice, and those things are there to a certain extent. But first and foremost, this is a movie about its two central characters and the ebb-and-flow textures of their life together. In short, it's a romance, and a darn good one at that. Grade: B+

Nuts! (2016)
A "mostly true" documentary tries to mix historical fiction and nonfiction into a folk concoction that's reminiscent of the fibs of its central huckster, John R. Brinkley, who claimed to have cured impotence by transplanting goat testicles into human males. It's a funny, outrageous bit of historical oddity, but the film's approach—a mix of talking heads and shoddy, frequently glib animation—lacks the precision needed to make its fictionalized nonfiction work like it should. In the hands of more skilled filmmakers, this might have been gold. Instead, it feels like a half-baked internet flash animation. Grade: C

Somewhere (2010)
When Sofia Coppola is on her game, the results are often hypnotic, using music and images to imbue that space between mundane and just slightly alien with unexpected verve and beauty. When she's off... well, you get Somewhere, my least-favorite S. Coppola film that I've seen and something of a chunkily textured anti-character study. The feeling of deflation that the protagonist feels near the end of the movie when his daughter's visit ends rings true, but it's one of the only engagingly human moments in the film, the rest meandering through the irritations of minor celebrity and wealth with a stateliness that approaches staleness. Look to pretty much any other of Coppola's films for a more compelling take on these same themes. Grade: C+

Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982)
Often clumsy and flimsy in its live-action segments, The Wall falls far short of the pedigree of its namesake album. However, when it works—and, like the album, it works most brutally in its latter half—the film is absolutely aces, as compelling a portrayal of misery and psychological anguish as the album itself, and even more effective as a slice of the British counterculture and its fallout. And let's not forget the animation, which is always excellent and the best part of the film, despite clocking in at just over fifteen minutes collectively. What I would have given to have had this entire movie animated. Grade: B+

3 Women (1977)
As someone who's only seen the big three from Robert Altman (those being M*A*S*H, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and Nashville), I found 3 Women to be pleasantly small turn from the guy's normal ensemble jigsaws. A psychological thriller very much in the vein of Bergman's Persona (if slightly less deconstructive) and what Roman Polanski was doing in the late '60s, it's a mesmerizing, head-scratching piece of filmmaking, made all the better by an all-time-great performance from already all-time-great performer Shelley Duvall. It's far too often that we forget that she pretty much batted 1.000 throughout most of the '70s and '80s. Grade: A-

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)
The title's a bit misleading, given that the giant woman doesn't attack until the last ten minutes of the movie (and isn't even giant for the majority of the preceding film). Also, characters repeatedly marvel at how the woman (and her male counterpart) must be "thirty feet tall." So that's strike two. Look, I'm probably not going to convince any haters that this is a good movie—there's plenty of ammunition there: titles aside, the special effects are startlingly bad, particularly the matte effects, and the dialogue is tepid. But I dunno, guys, I found this charming in all its raggedness, and from the way it's pretty much 80 percent domestic crime smut to the exaggeration of the "vengeful, wronged wife" trope to this level of sci-fi melodrama. Fans of second- (or third-) tier sci-fi from the era shouldn't miss it. Grade: B

Television

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Season 2 (2016-17)
While its shorter episode count makes Season 2 feel a little less complete than Season 1—character arcs feel rushed, plots feel underdeveloped—the second year of what's likely TV's best comedy right now is bolder, more complex, and more sure of itself than the first, which had a slightly rocky beginning. The end result is just tremendous TV, consistently hilarious, often hummable, and completely hitting its stride. Rachel Bloom's Rebecca Bunch is no less frantic and unwell—if anything, she's more so—which makes it all the more impressive that the series is able to find so much tenderness and compassion within a character who should, by all logic, be a whirlwind of irritating tropes. But as we all know, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. Grade: A-

Crisis in Six Scenes (2016)
Woody Allen made it abundantly clear prior to the release of Crisis in Six Scenes that his undertaking a TV series was a colossal mistake. And now, having seen the finished product, I'm unfortunately compelled to agree with him. An aimless, horribly paced, unfunny six episodes of tired Allen tropes, Crisis is just over the length of his longest feature films (not coincidentally, among his worst), but the good material within amounts to little more than an hour's worth of watchable work—to say nothing of the horrible structural issues the show faces as Allen apparently has no idea of the concept of a distinct episode and instead sequences scene after scene until he hits twenty-plus minutes and cuts it off until the next episode, whether or not the drama requires it. I'll go to bat for the fifth episode, centered around a bungled crime that makes it reminiscent of the bumbling capers of Manhattan Murder Mystery or Scoop, and overall, Allen has fun with the lightly satirical depiction of 1960s counterculture, both with Miley Cyrus's anarcho-Marxist revolutionary and the escalating gag of the old-ladies book club who decides to read her literature. But there's very little here to recommend that isn't found in better form in any number of Woody Allen's cinematic work, and even then, it's encased in so much lard that it wouldn't be out of case in a frontier butcher shop. Skip it. Grade: C

Books

The Vegetarian by Han Kang (2016)
I was going to avoid referencing Kafka in describing this book (not the least because he's already mentioned in one of the critical blurbs on the book's back cover), but how else do you describe unsettling surrealism that at first feels satirical before turning heartbreaking? It's Kafkaesque, through and through: a woman decides to become a vegetarian after unsettling dreams (see??), and the book follows the escalating fallout on her husband, her father, her brother-in-law, her sister, and her own psychology. The gorgeous translation by Deborah Smith manages to evoke the strange proceedings with wit and kinetic energy that never loses track of either the central horror or underlying sadness that imbues the work with its magnetic power. Grade: A-

The Sculptor by Scott McCloud (2015)
Color me disappointed. A cursory glance through The Sculptor promised a strikingly illustrated fable about an artist's bargain with Death. What it ends up being is a bit of a one-dimensional mix of romance and struggling artist clichés that indulge in the worst of Manic Pixie Dream Girl and "nobody understands my work" artist tropes. David is an artist who's of course above irony and instead wants to make people feel something; Meg is a woman whose sole purpose seems to be to brighten his existence with her quirky lust for life and the inevitability of her eventual sleeping with him. Also, she's bipolar but won't take her medication because she wants to "feel everything." If you can't tell, that's the sound of my eyes rolling. It's not all bad: the story gets pretty good toward the end, and the fantasy elements (pretty much everything to do with death) are both cool and poignant. And those striking illustrations the book's initial pages promised me are totally there and totally great. It's just frustrating that those elements couldn't have concealed into a more consistently good package. Grade: B-

Prog Progress 1973: Yes - Tales from Topographic Oceans

Hi, everyone! Welcome to Prog Progress, a blog series in which I journey through the history of progressive rock by reviewing one album from every year of the genre's existence. You can read more about the project here. You can learn about what I think are some of the roots of progressive rock here. You can see links for the whole series here.

Within the notoriously fickle winds of critical and public taste, one thing has remained remarkably constant since at least the mid-'70s, and that is the general disdain for progressive rock among tastemakers and otherwise hip people (not to mention the general public, which barely had time for prog in its commercial and critical heyday, what with all that Elton John music to listen to). There have been moments where it has gained a modicum of respectability: Radiohead's release of OK Computer, the film Buffalo '66, James Murphy's use of prog staples in his DJ setlists, the continuing work and increased visibility of Steven Wilson (who has recently been responsible for some fantastic remasters of progressive rock classics, including a recent one of today's subject, ol' Topographic Oceans itself). And in our current era of inclusive taste, poptimism, and virulent anti-elitism, it's entirely possible that prog's days as pop culture pariah may be behind it—after all, disco managed it.

But for decades, this is what held true among those who cared: progressive rock was stuffy, mannered, bloated, fey, pretentious (ah yes, that old word), a genre too in love with its own cleverness and the creation of byzantine conceptual virtuosity to have anything of an emotional spark, a betrayal of the white light/white heat of rock's true spirit pioneered by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and later by Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones. As James Franco's character on Freaks and Geeks puts it, "Rock 'n roll doesn't come from your brain; it comes from your crotch." And when someone gets on a good rant about prog's excess, it's always Yes's sixth album, Tales from Topographic Oceans that gets named as Exhibit A.

Clearly, I'm a prog apologist, or I wouldn't be writing this series. I also happen to think that Tales from Topographic Oceans is pretty good, and I'll get to that in a moment. But let's be fair to the haters here. This is what Topographic Oceans is: an 82-minute, double-LP concept album wherein each of its four tracks occupy an entire LP side a piece and rhapsodize on each of the four Hindu shastras as inspired by lead singer Jon Anderson's obsession with, as he calls it, "a lengthy footnote" in the autobiography of Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda. I'm out of breath just typing that, and that's not even the end of it. The album liner notes also lets us know that the album's four tracks are "movements," not songs. The liner notes also show, just in case you missed it when you listened, that the lyrics are written in several different languages. They also mention that Anderson, along with guitarist Steve Howe, composed the record's music by candlelight.

So when people accuse Topographic Oceans as being overly complex, mannered, in love with conceptual virtuosity, etc., I think it's best to own up and admit that oh yes, it certainly is.

It wasn't always this way for Yes. a band who formed in 1968 sounding very much of a piece with the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, and any number of psychedelic-leaning hard rock bands of the time, albeit one set apart by Jon Anderson's limber and ethereal vocals, often backed by delicate folk harmonies. In fact, Lester Bangs himself (one of rock's preeminent "crotch, not brain" critics) had positive things to say about Yes's self-titled debut. But with each successive release, Yes accumulated both band members and ambitions, first Steve Howe and a penchant for grandiose, multi-part epics on their third record, The Yes Album, and then flamboyant keyboardist Rick Wakeman and classical-infused, lengthy instrumental breaks on 1971's Fragile (an album that scored the band its biggest hit single in "Roundabout," an 8-minute jam with a killer groove that radio audiences devoured when shortened to its single-length 3-minute cut, and to this day, it's one of the few prog rock tracks that's still a regular in the classic rock radio circuit). Things came to a head in 1972, an all-around banner year for prog in general and Yes in particular with the release of the towering Close to the Edge. It's an album in which all the band's percolating talents and proclivities up to that point congealed into something truly magnificent: three songs, one occupying an entire LP side, the other two both lasting nearly ten minutes, that each showcase a dizzyingly complex interplay of instruments, words, and production to craft a cosmic wall of sounds and melody. Close to the Edge is nearly perfect, regarded both in the prog community and in music fandom at large as a masterpiece and one of the finest works prog ever produced.

So, like... where do you go from there? In 1973, Yes's answer turned out to be much the same as the rest of the progressive rock community, which, to conflate Pink Floyd with Icarus, was to set their controls for the heart of the sun. There's an exhilaration in prog's fat early-to-mid-'70s years that some people read as pretentious bloat but comes across to me much more as a giddy, incredulous curiosity to see just how high they could fly this machine. And they got pretty high, in both metaphorical ways you can take that.

So you've got something like Tales from Topographic Oceans, which, Hindu conceptual genesis aside, feels musically very much like someone in Yes took a look at Close to the Edge and said, "What if we did this again, but with more?" Yes's trajectory from their inception up until Close to the Edge had been one of steady innovation, where each successive record introduced a new musical element or ambition. Topographic Oceans, on the other hand, is the first Yes album to not sound sonically distinct from its predecessor—save for a few experiments late in the album's third and fourth quarters, there's not really anything here that couldn't have also been on Close to the Edge. On the whole, the main innovation here seems just to be the sheer maximalism of the thing. At over twice the length of Close to the Edge and with every one of its four "movements" as long or longer than Close to the Edge's 18-minute title track, Tales from Topographic Oceans is enormous even by prog's outsized standards.

The role of Tales as basically Close to the Edge, Vol. 2-5 could lead one to ask whether a lack of inhibitions and editing skills is really viable as a musical concept to inform the production of an album, and Tales from Topographic Oceans's legion of critics argue precisely this. I'd probably be inclined to ask that very question myself if it weren't for the fact that as a supersized return to Close to the Edge's landscapes, this album actually works really well. Oh, undoubtedly it's overlong, and Wikipedia cites an illuminating quote from Rick Wakeman in 2006, who says, "Because of the format of how records used to be, we had too much for a single album but not enough for a double.: This strikes me as about right; if Yes had had the luxury of the CD format available at the time, Topographic Oceans likely would have made a much better 65-70 minute album, shaving off some of the more padded sections of the first and second movements (which is where the album does kind of drag). But when this album's on, which happens the majority of the time, it's on. There are moments here that absolutely soar, particularly in the third and fourth movements: the cascading voices singing "As they don't seem to matter at all, at all, at all" over and over at the fourth's climax, the twisting grooves of the third's lengthy instrumental digressions, and a couple others are sections that I would actually rank above the best on Close to the Edge, and even when the album isn't besting Yes's masterpiece, it's still no slouch.

And actually, I'm selling the album a bit short by calling it a complete retread of Close to the Edge's sound; more than any other Yes album, there's an impulse toward music's experimental outskirts here that makes for some of the most interesting sounds in Yes's run, particularly on Movement Three, where it's clear the band is trying to make music that sounded like nothing people had heard before. Of course, this is all sandwiched between long stretches that do, in fact, sound a lot like Close to the Edge, and I do wish that this intermittently adventurous sonic experimentation overtook a bit more of the record. But it's there, enough so that it ruffled the feathers of Rick Wakeman, who dismissed the band as moving toward "avant-garde jazz rock" and left the group soon after touring the album for a legendarily bombastic solo career (a career in which he traded jazz rock for this, which... well, I guess there's no accounting for taste, but really). Relayer, the Yes album that immediately follows Tales, would take this allegation pretty seriously, doubling down on the jazz to the point where large chunks of the record are basically jazz fusion. It's alright.

It's not all bona-fide great, granted. As I said, this material would have been better served in a package 10-20 minutes shorter. But it's hardly the pile of vomit suggested by Pitchfork's 2.0/10.0 review, or even the notorious flew-too-close-to-the-sun hubris that energized punk, as claimed by so many punk documentaries (it's little remarked upon that various members of the Sex Pistols covered Yes songs at times). It's just, by my reckoning, a good—if flawed—record from a band at their musical height.

You'll notice I've not touched the intricate shastras lyrical concept that inspired the album, and frankly, that's because it's gobbledygook. Look, I'm all for religious experiences and lyrics that yearns for the sublime as Tales's seem to. It's clear that Anderson felt something extremely meaningful within the idea of the Hindu texts, and I mean, good for him. But these lyrics don't make a lick of sense beyond a very abstract sensory and mythical depiction of spiritual enlightenment. Maybe that abstraction is a feature, not a bug, of the album, and I'll attest to the fact that not really caring what the lyrics say do make them kind of meditative, just another instrument intertwined with the rest of the rich sonic atmosphere. Honestly, that's how I approach most Yes lyrics, too—I couldn't tell you much of what Close to the Edge was about, although there's a bit more to latch onto there. I suspect the lyrics here are a test of what kind of music listener you are, whether or not you're willing to simply let lyrics be sonic texture or whether you demand them to mean something that you can personally latch onto.

Which, I think, is a dichotomy of listening philosophy that can apply to progressive rock as a whole. Those who come to the genre looking to exegete the meaning of a piece of music are bound to be disappointed by prog's promises of heady intellectual concepts and intricate themes. That's there, and it's occasionally profound, but I've found that more often than not, prog as a whole falls into the same camp as Tales from Topographic Oceans's lyrics, swallowed up by abstraction and psychedelic meandering in a way that confounds deep study to anyone who isn't interested in reveling in how "heavy" all the sci-fi/fantasy/spiritual stuff is (another valid response, if seldom found outside of college freshmen). A much more rewarding way to approach prog is, I think, to view it as a sensory experience, where aesthetics become a kind of meaning rather than anything concretely expressible.

Maybe it's this approach that makes me like Tales from Topographic Oceans as much as I do. Whatever. I understand why this album wouldn't be everyone's cup of tea—heck, any album this long is probably going to cull its listener base quite a bit. But it's also an album that, as prog seemingly becomes less and less stigmatized, I hope to see go through a bit of a reevaluation over the next few years. Maybe that Steven Wilson remaster will get people listening to this thing again. Maybe Kanye will sample it on his next album (I'm only half joking here). There's a lot of riches to be found within its 82 minutes.

Until 1974!

Mini-Reviews for January 30 - February 5, 2017

Another week. The world's still around, so why not have some reviews?

Movies

Gremlins (1984)

There are all sorts of subtexts to this movie (including a couple uncomfortable ones about race), but the one that feels most trenchant to me is its relentlessly masochistic relationship with American kitsch, especially that particular blend of greed, treacle, and pointless invention found most around Christmastime. The film takes a great deal of care setting up a rather affectionate portrayal of the secular Christmas traditions and the harmless but ultimately cheap toys and gadgetry that surrounds it. But there's also no denying the anarchic glee with which the film deploys its agents of mayhem in burning those traditions to the ground in ways that range from comical to sardonic to outright horrific (Phoebe Cates's character's explanation for not liking Christmas is straight out of a nightmare). Gremlins walks a fascinating, self-loathing, never-dull line that both celebrates and ridicules the implicit and often hokey texts we point to in identifying "American" and "foreign," and I loved every minute of it. Grade: A

Train to Busan (부산행) (2016)

Goodness knows I don't want this to become my mantra, but... the action scenes sure are the best thing about this movie. The film's "zombie apocalypse on a train" premise gives it a linear is inspired, surely, by 2013's Snowpiercer, but the zombies themselves feel like a much-improved version of World War Z's mounding hoards. In its most breathtaking moments, Train to Busan reimagines zombie survival as a matter of fluid dynamics, the infected piling up against dam-like structures, applying pressure, rushing flood-like when released. The father-daughter dynamics going on with our protagonist here are a bit yawn, but the zombie action is immensely entertaining. Grade: B+

Black Hawk Down (2001)

Can there be a great war movie that isn't at least a little preoccupied with the ethics of war? My gut says yes, but only in theory—I've yet to encounter one. Saving Private Ryan comes close, though, both to being a great movie and to not being preoccupied with the ethics of war, and Black Hawk Down is definitely a film inspired by the unflinching carnage and intense combat of that then-recent Spielbeg film. But there's an admirable attention to detail in Black Hawk Down that sets it apart from Saving Private Ryan, giving the Battle of Mogadishu a meticulous, boots-on-the-ground feel. Here's the thing, though: it's all super boring. It shouldn't be: this movie is pretty much wall-to-wall action, but I guess action without reprieve lends itself to numbness, which lends itself to boredom. And also absent of any sort of social commentary or ethical interrogation, there's really not a lot going on here beyond the blow-by-blow battle detail. Maybe if I'd been in the military, this would be more interesting to me. But I wasn't, and this was tedious. Grade: C+

Clerks (1994)

There's about half this movie that works really well--the conceit, two bored employees of adjacent go-nowhere stores shooting the breeze during a particularly long day, is enormously appealing to me, and when Clerks sticks to just that spooling out of conversation about low-grade philosophizing about daily mundanities and the comic absurdities that come from long hours in retail, it's pretty fun. Writer/director Kevin Smith has a good ear for the naturalistic-but-stylized speech that makes the lengthy soliloquizing of Richard Linklater characters similarly listenable. But when this movie goes anywhere near a plot, it's a disaster. Tonally clumsy, start-stop pacing makes the plotting feel half-baked, and its treatment of its plot-centric characters (all of whom are women) is casually mean to the point of near cruelty, not to mention a late-movie joke that's so dark it almost consumes the film whole. There's good stuff here, but given Smith's reputation these days, the fact that the flaws in his nearly universally agreed-upon best movie stand out so starkly makes for a big warning light. Unless someone gives me a great case otherwise, I'll probably not seek out the rest of his work. Grade: B-

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

In our age of seemingly effortless cinematic spectacle, Jason and the Argonauts is a nice reminder why such spectacle was appealing to begin with. Every one of its meticulously stop-motioned action sequences practically flies off the screen, not for any sort of realism but just out of the sheer thrill of having a movie show off impossible wonders—outside of the mythology it's based on, the only thing I knew about this movie was the climactic skeleton fight, and man oh man, is it justifiably legendary. Outside of these thrilling kinetics, though, the movie is a total drag, complete with the typically leaden dialogue and acting that seemed to be the price of admission for pretty much any epic of this era of filmmaking. Luckily, the movie is more action than cardboard drama, so it's pretty fun. Grade: B+

Television

The Legend of Korra, Season 4 (2014)

If The Legend of Korra's series finale doesn't quite match the towering heights of its predecessor's, Avatar: The Last Airbender's legendary "Sozin's Comet," we can forgive it for nothing else than for Nickelodeon's criminal undercutting of the show's financing. Up to its end, Korra remained, as it always was, often by monetary necessity, a smaller, more intimate show than Avatar, and in the character moments, the smaller scale paid off in spades, giving more nuanced and mature arcs than the admittedly younger-skewing Avatar ever did. That payoff remains true in this fourth and final season, with particularly Korra's battle with something resembling PTSD and Bolin's goofy but heartfelt coming-of-age. The climactic battle isn't quite up to the mind-melting Avatar finale, and that's where the Nickelodeon scope stretches a bit thin, with obviously CG-ed giant mechas distracting a bit from the always excellent character animation. It helps that Korra's fourth season has a tremendous villain in the fascist Kuvira, which does a ton to ameliorate the limitations of the series, and when all is said and done, Season 4 contains some of Korra's best work. Grade: A-

Music

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Moods (2017)

In what may in fact be the Sgt. Pepper of the mash-up album, longtime remixer and internet jokester (and apparently creator of Potter Puppet Pals?) Neil Cicierega has crafted a record of ingenious and frequently genius pop-culture mixing. Every single track bursts at the seams with invention and audacity, be it turning "Wonderwall" into a club stomper by mixing it with "You Spin Me Round" or shuffling the lyrics to "Eye of the Tiger" to engineer a tribute to an actual tiger (complete with Tony the Tiger's "They're grrrrreat!" soundbites). Mash-ups are often brutish, cramming two disparate pieces of pop music together with all the gentleness the name implies. Cicierega, however, works with grace and precision, most often to comedic effect (a pitch-corrected Barenaked Ladies's "One Week" over the "Stand By Me" instrumentals, for example) but occasionally to the sublime (the album's best moment by far—and probably the year's best song yet—involves the Inception soundtrack and the "Y.M.C.A."). I suppose you could argue that Mouth Moods is an exercise in gimmickry and meme-ing ("All Star" and "One Week," fixtures of online musical memes for a while now, do feature prominently), but I dunno, there's something about this album that transcends mere jokes or internet culture repetition—the care of the sample selection, the artistry of the production, the sheer joy of the amazingly effective incongruity. It is, frankly, brilliant. Grade: A