Sunday, June 30, 2019
Mini Reviews for June 24-30, 2019
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Sunday, June 23, 2019
Mini Reviews for June 17-23, 2019
HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Chuck & Buck!
I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to
put in a suggestion for next week (or put in another one), here's the
link:
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Movies
Chuck & Buck (2000) Reader Suggestion!
The heavy film grain and high-wire threading of black comedy, sentimentality, and a fascination with outsiders is vintage '90s American indie. Like a lot of those movies, I'm not sure how successfully on a moment-by-moment basis the movie walks its balance between making its clearly-traumatized-yet-creepy protagonist the butt of our ridicule/disdain and inviting our investment in the guy regardless. But by the end of the movie, it's clear that the holistic thrust of the film is one of compassion. Mike White (who also wrote the movie) stars as a mostly closeted gay man whose only connection as a child to a loving world growing up in his (it is implied) abusive household is his both emotional and physical relationship with his friend Buck, a relationship he desperately and obsessively clings to as an adult. Though the movie doesn't shirk from extreme discomfort with the actions White's protagonist takes in pursuing this relationship, the film also has a deep regard for the work he must do to create a happy life virtually ex nihilo, and when he finally manages to do so by the movie's end, it's a meaningful and sweet conclusion to an otherwise hair-raising journey. Grade: B
Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben) (2018)
Asghar Farhadi movies usually hinge on critical moments of ambiguous epistemology: how do we know what we know, and how many pieces of that process can we remove before we have to relinquish certainty? As the title implies, Everybody Knows involves a twist on that concept in the sense that it's an exploration of what happens at critical moments of certain epistemology: what happens when enough people know for certain information that had once been considered secret? When a child is kidnapped from a wedding reception, the movie's crisis is (in addition to the kidnapping itself) how this traumatic event reveals just how many people knew the supposed "secret" of this child's parentage—a sort of inverted About Elly. It lacks the brutal precision of some of Farhadi's more iconic films (including About Elly), but it's also a clear attempt by Farhadi to do something fundamentally new within his normal genre trappings, which I think is admirable and at times super effective. It is a thriller, after all, and while it's too long to be the punch to the gut Farhadi's other thrillers are, I can't say that I wasn't thrilled at times nonetheless. Grade: B+
Gloria Bell (2018)
Julianne Moore is a stunning light at the center of this movie, playing the titular "woman of a certain age" with a barbed sensitivity. Barring some really nice, expressionistic lighting, there really isn't a whole lot going on with this movie, though—the plot is aimless, the divorcée drama feels a little forced, and none of the secondary characters (including one played by a disappointingly staid John Turturro) make much of an impact, though credit where credit is due, the script puts some sharp dialogue in these characters mouths occasionally. So it's all the more impressive that Moore is able to carry the movie as far as she is. Grade: B-
Birds of Passage (Pájaros de verano) (2018)
Basically The Godfather as seen from the other side of the border: a years-spanning Colombian crime epic that depicts the way that assimilation with the craven relentlessness of North American capitalism rots a society and destroys an indigenous culture. The film's ideas are striking, as are its depictions of indigenous traditions and practices in the context of the encroaching Westernness, which does a lot to spice up the pretty staid crime epic patterns that the movie otherwise falls into. But the movie still is beholden to some pretty rigid patterns, and the style is probably a little too chilly-arthouse for its own good, so there's a good portion of the film that's neither exciting on a plot level nor energetic enough to make the predictable plot exciting either. Nevertheless, I appreciate the new perspective this brings to the old crime epic genre. Grade: B
Red Hook Summer (2012)
Red Hook Summer is messy in the way that Spike Lee's 2010s output has often been. There are stylistic flourishes and scenes and plot threads and whole performances that just kind of amble forward without a ton of momentum or seeming purpose; most naggingly of all that is how Jules Brown and Toni Lysaith give two entirely wooden performances, and I can only imagine that their stammering, stiff line deliveries and postures are intentional for effect, but I'll be damned if I can parse what that effect is supposed to be. But this is also Spike Lee's most dedicated engagement with religion in general and Christianity in particular, and specifically, how Christianity intersects community writ large and its role as a deeply ingrained institution and also as something of a relic of the past that the community is evolving past. It is, in short, a dissection of faith by way of a dissection of a lushly vibrant community, a dissection built on bold contradictions and juxtapositions—cresting with the image of an abusive pastor contorted like Jesus, wearing his own tambourine as a crown of thorns—maybe the most audacious image of Spike's career. And if y'all think I can resist that, you folks are sorely mistaken. There's a late-breaking plot development that makes the whole movie, messiness and all, snap into focus. It's maybe not a focus I can entirely articulate right now, but it's one with a tremendous aesthetic and theological thrust, a story of a Christ who just happens to be white in his paintings and a pastor who just happens to lead a church in decline and a Brooklyn that just happens to be pushing its poorest residents to the far tip of the borough until they can see Lady Liberty's face—and how none of this actually "just happened" after all. I won't go so far as to put it among Spike Lee's very best (to my mind: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, The 25th Hour), but it's certainly among his best of this decade—maybe the best. Grade: A
Veiled Aristocrats (1932)
There are some really interesting ideas about the concept of racial passing at the heart of this film, and the movie is smart to hinge its emotional weight on those ideas. But also, it's convoluted and tedious in the way that a lot of Micheaux movies can be, so it's not like it's a rollicking ride or anything. Grade: C
Within Our Gates (1920)
Easily the best Oscar Micheaux feature I've seen thus far. It's not that the movie is less flawed than the director's other movies: Within Our Gates still has that propensity for tediously convoluted domestic drama, it still feels painted with an overly broad moralism, the acting and writing are still stiff as boards. However, the movie also shares Micheaux's frequent obsession with all facets of the early-20th-century African-American experience, an obsession that links the domestic stretches of this movie to a series of the most well-observed character vignettes of his career, involving small indignities oriented around assimilation, uplift, education, class, and racism of all stripes—all of which culminates in a climactic depiction of a lynching that makes absolutely clear that every piece, no matter how small, of a racist society is ultimately complicit in horrific violence. It's by far the most bracing thing I've seen in Micheaux's work, and one of the most bracing things I've seen in silent cinema in general. Grade: B+
P.S. I (and a couple of folks much smarter than I am) talked about Within Our Gates on episode 252 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.
Television
Fleabag, Series 2 (2019)
The second (and presumably final) series of Phoebe Waller-Bridges's Fleabag is an improvement over its first at every turn: funnier, sadder, more profound. It opens with a gonzo single-scene Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque family dinner episode that surely cements Waller-Bridges's place among the current pantheon of electric television writers, maybe the best episode of TV I've seen all year this side of Russian Doll (and even then, perhaps it tops even that), and while none of the subsequent episodes are as viscerally wrenching as that opening salvo, they're all every bit as smart and considered. The series opens with Waller-Bridges's Fleabag character, nose mysteriously bloodied, looking into the camera and telling us that "This is a love story," and she's not wrong. This year (three years after the airing of the original Fleabag but only "371 Days, 19 Hours & 26 Minutes Later" in the show's time), Fleabag has fallen for a Catholic priest, a setup that is Shakespearean in its tragedy, given Fleabag's sexual thirst and the priest's obvious celibacy. But the depths this season plumbs are far more profound than the sacriligious carnal/sanctified dichotomy that her pairing with the priest initially suggests; this series's six episodes take love not just as the material intersection of two people but also in its holistic emotional, spiritual, and even transcendent dimensions of two people who find connection with one another. The religion invoked by the presence of a priest character is not simply the setup to a sexual conflict but also the beginning of a serious exploration of the ways that existential meaning, the search for the divine, and the true understanding of who another human being is all intersect in messy and otherworldly ways, and one of the most shocking moments of television I've seen in years—as shocking as the edgiest twist in the tightest thriller—is built from a brief instance of profound connection that wraps together love and interiority and the divine all in one fleeting glance. I won't spoil that moment, but I literally gasped out loud. This is Great Television, folks. Grade: A
Books
Night Shift by Stephen King (1978)
Stephen King's first short story collection is, alongside his run of '70s novels, sort of the ur-text for understanding King's place in pop culture. A lot of these stories were adapted into movies, and often quite famous ones at that: to name just a few, "Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "The Mangler," "Graveyard Shift," "Quitters, Inc.," and "The Ledge" (the last two of which formed sections of the 1985 anthology film Cat's Eye). So yeah, this collection casts a long shadow on King's legacy. Like his '70s novels, the stories in this collection often lack the nuance and complexity of his later work and instead evoke a sort of bemused, b-movie sensibility that's meaner than later King would be, and that's not always a bad thing, given how cumbersome and self-impressed some of King's work could get during the worst impulses of his writing in the '80s and especially the '90s. There's something to be said for the quick-and-dirty ethos that goes into these stories, the complete lack of futzing around. Some of it is kind of dumb—I'm astounded that "Trucks," easily the worst story here, is the one King decided to adapt into his sole effort at directing a film, Maximum Overdrive—but the majority of the stories are at least fun, and a few of them are quite chilling. My two favorites, "Graveyard Shift" and "The Lawnmower Man," are both really great at being kind of laughable in premise but get-under-your-skin creepy in execution. Like any short story collection, there's a bit of unevenness from tale to tale, but on the whole, it's a solid read. Grade: B+
Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare [maybe?] (c. 1606-1608)
Uh... wut. Easily the most bizarre play attributed to Shakespeare that I've read (and even that attribution has a lot of asterisks by it, as the historical record is unclear—but he probably wrote at least part of it). Its meandering, picaresque plot jumps ridiculously through time and space by ease of one ridiculous plot twist after another, plot twists involving presumed dead-characters being discovered alive, pirates hitherto unmentioned storming the stage to kidnap a character about to be murdered, and more shipwrecks that you can count. Honestly, it feels like every time the story was getting boring, the playwright was just like, "Hey, let's throw in a shipwreck to spice things up." It's wild and not particularly good outside of how wild it is. "Exit, pursued by a bear" ain't got nothing on this one. Grade: C+
Music
William Basinski - On Time Out of Time (2019)
An ambient drone made from processed space sounds—specifically, as Basinski says in the liner notes, "recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago." I don't have much more to say about this; I like space and black holes, and I like this album a whole lot. Grade: A-
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Movies
The heavy film grain and high-wire threading of black comedy, sentimentality, and a fascination with outsiders is vintage '90s American indie. Like a lot of those movies, I'm not sure how successfully on a moment-by-moment basis the movie walks its balance between making its clearly-traumatized-yet-creepy protagonist the butt of our ridicule/disdain and inviting our investment in the guy regardless. But by the end of the movie, it's clear that the holistic thrust of the film is one of compassion. Mike White (who also wrote the movie) stars as a mostly closeted gay man whose only connection as a child to a loving world growing up in his (it is implied) abusive household is his both emotional and physical relationship with his friend Buck, a relationship he desperately and obsessively clings to as an adult. Though the movie doesn't shirk from extreme discomfort with the actions White's protagonist takes in pursuing this relationship, the film also has a deep regard for the work he must do to create a happy life virtually ex nihilo, and when he finally manages to do so by the movie's end, it's a meaningful and sweet conclusion to an otherwise hair-raising journey. Grade: B
Asghar Farhadi movies usually hinge on critical moments of ambiguous epistemology: how do we know what we know, and how many pieces of that process can we remove before we have to relinquish certainty? As the title implies, Everybody Knows involves a twist on that concept in the sense that it's an exploration of what happens at critical moments of certain epistemology: what happens when enough people know for certain information that had once been considered secret? When a child is kidnapped from a wedding reception, the movie's crisis is (in addition to the kidnapping itself) how this traumatic event reveals just how many people knew the supposed "secret" of this child's parentage—a sort of inverted About Elly. It lacks the brutal precision of some of Farhadi's more iconic films (including About Elly), but it's also a clear attempt by Farhadi to do something fundamentally new within his normal genre trappings, which I think is admirable and at times super effective. It is a thriller, after all, and while it's too long to be the punch to the gut Farhadi's other thrillers are, I can't say that I wasn't thrilled at times nonetheless. Grade: B+
Julianne Moore is a stunning light at the center of this movie, playing the titular "woman of a certain age" with a barbed sensitivity. Barring some really nice, expressionistic lighting, there really isn't a whole lot going on with this movie, though—the plot is aimless, the divorcée drama feels a little forced, and none of the secondary characters (including one played by a disappointingly staid John Turturro) make much of an impact, though credit where credit is due, the script puts some sharp dialogue in these characters mouths occasionally. So it's all the more impressive that Moore is able to carry the movie as far as she is. Grade: B-
Basically The Godfather as seen from the other side of the border: a years-spanning Colombian crime epic that depicts the way that assimilation with the craven relentlessness of North American capitalism rots a society and destroys an indigenous culture. The film's ideas are striking, as are its depictions of indigenous traditions and practices in the context of the encroaching Westernness, which does a lot to spice up the pretty staid crime epic patterns that the movie otherwise falls into. But the movie still is beholden to some pretty rigid patterns, and the style is probably a little too chilly-arthouse for its own good, so there's a good portion of the film that's neither exciting on a plot level nor energetic enough to make the predictable plot exciting either. Nevertheless, I appreciate the new perspective this brings to the old crime epic genre. Grade: B
Red Hook Summer is messy in the way that Spike Lee's 2010s output has often been. There are stylistic flourishes and scenes and plot threads and whole performances that just kind of amble forward without a ton of momentum or seeming purpose; most naggingly of all that is how Jules Brown and Toni Lysaith give two entirely wooden performances, and I can only imagine that their stammering, stiff line deliveries and postures are intentional for effect, but I'll be damned if I can parse what that effect is supposed to be. But this is also Spike Lee's most dedicated engagement with religion in general and Christianity in particular, and specifically, how Christianity intersects community writ large and its role as a deeply ingrained institution and also as something of a relic of the past that the community is evolving past. It is, in short, a dissection of faith by way of a dissection of a lushly vibrant community, a dissection built on bold contradictions and juxtapositions—cresting with the image of an abusive pastor contorted like Jesus, wearing his own tambourine as a crown of thorns—maybe the most audacious image of Spike's career. And if y'all think I can resist that, you folks are sorely mistaken. There's a late-breaking plot development that makes the whole movie, messiness and all, snap into focus. It's maybe not a focus I can entirely articulate right now, but it's one with a tremendous aesthetic and theological thrust, a story of a Christ who just happens to be white in his paintings and a pastor who just happens to lead a church in decline and a Brooklyn that just happens to be pushing its poorest residents to the far tip of the borough until they can see Lady Liberty's face—and how none of this actually "just happened" after all. I won't go so far as to put it among Spike Lee's very best (to my mind: Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, The 25th Hour), but it's certainly among his best of this decade—maybe the best. Grade: A
There are some really interesting ideas about the concept of racial passing at the heart of this film, and the movie is smart to hinge its emotional weight on those ideas. But also, it's convoluted and tedious in the way that a lot of Micheaux movies can be, so it's not like it's a rollicking ride or anything. Grade: C
Easily the best Oscar Micheaux feature I've seen thus far. It's not that the movie is less flawed than the director's other movies: Within Our Gates still has that propensity for tediously convoluted domestic drama, it still feels painted with an overly broad moralism, the acting and writing are still stiff as boards. However, the movie also shares Micheaux's frequent obsession with all facets of the early-20th-century African-American experience, an obsession that links the domestic stretches of this movie to a series of the most well-observed character vignettes of his career, involving small indignities oriented around assimilation, uplift, education, class, and racism of all stripes—all of which culminates in a climactic depiction of a lynching that makes absolutely clear that every piece, no matter how small, of a racist society is ultimately complicit in horrific violence. It's by far the most bracing thing I've seen in Micheaux's work, and one of the most bracing things I've seen in silent cinema in general. Grade: B+
P.S. I (and a couple of folks much smarter than I am) talked about Within Our Gates on episode 252 of the Cinematary podcast, which you can listen to here.
Television
The second (and presumably final) series of Phoebe Waller-Bridges's Fleabag is an improvement over its first at every turn: funnier, sadder, more profound. It opens with a gonzo single-scene Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque family dinner episode that surely cements Waller-Bridges's place among the current pantheon of electric television writers, maybe the best episode of TV I've seen all year this side of Russian Doll (and even then, perhaps it tops even that), and while none of the subsequent episodes are as viscerally wrenching as that opening salvo, they're all every bit as smart and considered. The series opens with Waller-Bridges's Fleabag character, nose mysteriously bloodied, looking into the camera and telling us that "This is a love story," and she's not wrong. This year (three years after the airing of the original Fleabag but only "371 Days, 19 Hours & 26 Minutes Later" in the show's time), Fleabag has fallen for a Catholic priest, a setup that is Shakespearean in its tragedy, given Fleabag's sexual thirst and the priest's obvious celibacy. But the depths this season plumbs are far more profound than the sacriligious carnal/sanctified dichotomy that her pairing with the priest initially suggests; this series's six episodes take love not just as the material intersection of two people but also in its holistic emotional, spiritual, and even transcendent dimensions of two people who find connection with one another. The religion invoked by the presence of a priest character is not simply the setup to a sexual conflict but also the beginning of a serious exploration of the ways that existential meaning, the search for the divine, and the true understanding of who another human being is all intersect in messy and otherworldly ways, and one of the most shocking moments of television I've seen in years—as shocking as the edgiest twist in the tightest thriller—is built from a brief instance of profound connection that wraps together love and interiority and the divine all in one fleeting glance. I won't spoil that moment, but I literally gasped out loud. This is Great Television, folks. Grade: A
Books
Stephen King's first short story collection is, alongside his run of '70s novels, sort of the ur-text for understanding King's place in pop culture. A lot of these stories were adapted into movies, and often quite famous ones at that: to name just a few, "Children of the Corn," "The Lawnmower Man," "The Mangler," "Graveyard Shift," "Quitters, Inc.," and "The Ledge" (the last two of which formed sections of the 1985 anthology film Cat's Eye). So yeah, this collection casts a long shadow on King's legacy. Like his '70s novels, the stories in this collection often lack the nuance and complexity of his later work and instead evoke a sort of bemused, b-movie sensibility that's meaner than later King would be, and that's not always a bad thing, given how cumbersome and self-impressed some of King's work could get during the worst impulses of his writing in the '80s and especially the '90s. There's something to be said for the quick-and-dirty ethos that goes into these stories, the complete lack of futzing around. Some of it is kind of dumb—I'm astounded that "Trucks," easily the worst story here, is the one King decided to adapt into his sole effort at directing a film, Maximum Overdrive—but the majority of the stories are at least fun, and a few of them are quite chilling. My two favorites, "Graveyard Shift" and "The Lawnmower Man," are both really great at being kind of laughable in premise but get-under-your-skin creepy in execution. Like any short story collection, there's a bit of unevenness from tale to tale, but on the whole, it's a solid read. Grade: B+
Uh... wut. Easily the most bizarre play attributed to Shakespeare that I've read (and even that attribution has a lot of asterisks by it, as the historical record is unclear—but he probably wrote at least part of it). Its meandering, picaresque plot jumps ridiculously through time and space by ease of one ridiculous plot twist after another, plot twists involving presumed dead-characters being discovered alive, pirates hitherto unmentioned storming the stage to kidnap a character about to be murdered, and more shipwrecks that you can count. Honestly, it feels like every time the story was getting boring, the playwright was just like, "Hey, let's throw in a shipwreck to spice things up." It's wild and not particularly good outside of how wild it is. "Exit, pursued by a bear" ain't got nothing on this one. Grade: C+
Music
An ambient drone made from processed space sounds—specifically, as Basinski says in the liner notes, "recordings from the interferometers of LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) capturing the sounds of the merging of two distant massive black holes, 1.3 billion years ago." I don't have much more to say about this; I like space and black holes, and I like this album a whole lot. Grade: A-
Sunday, June 16, 2019
Mini Reviews for June 10-16, 2019
HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Big Daddy!
I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to
put in a suggestion for next week (or put in a second one), here's the
link:
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Please, if you have good cheer for your fellow man in your hearts, don't put any more Adam Sandler movies in there.
Movies
Big Daddy (1999) Reader Suggestion!
This movie is so bereft of good ideas. Like, I can't think of a single one here. The plot, in which Adam Sandler has to take care of an unaccompanied minor, is full of the stalest "haha, clueless parent does inappropriate things" tropes until it veers into some deep sentimentality, and neither mode works at all. The humor isn't funny, and it's disappointingly short on the madcap energy of something like Billy Madison; Sandler's typical '90s man-child performance is dialed down to a sleepy lull here, which is weird, given that he's playing opposite an actual child, and the few jokes that aren't hinged on this dynamic are bizarrely hung up on shaming Leslie Mann's character for having worked at Hooters. Then the sentiment feels cloying and unearned, not to mention wanting to have its cake and it eat regarding the level of knowing ironic distance from said sentiment. Also, it's a cheap shot because most kid actors are bad, but man alive are Dylan and Cole Sprouse bad here—this is, like, sub-Olsen-Twins-in-Full-House bad. I hope they let both of the Sprouse twins pee on the side of a building with Sandler, though, because that was probably a good time. A better time than I had watching this movie, to be sure. Grade: D+
The Son of Joseph (Le Fils de Joseph) (2016)
You would think this would be exactly up my alley: a satirical domestic drama based on recurring motifs from the Bible and the visual arts in a completely audacious way that flirts with sacrilege before landing at deep piety. And when the movie gets to that moment in its final few minutes, it's pretty breathtaking. But the movie is just so suffocatingly affected in its style that I feel a thousand yards away from anything happening in this movie. I enjoyed La Sapienza, writer-director Eugène Green's 2015 feature, but that movie's self-conscious emphasis on architecture made a lot more sense with the static shots and direct camera addresses than the considerably more human subject matter does here. Grade: B-
Mother (마더) (2009)
A somewhat standard crime procedural—a mother must sleuth around to prove her accused son's innocence—until the final fifteen minutes make it something much bleaker and more heartbreaking, as unflinching a stare into the void as I've seen in a while. The movie probably hangs too much on the standard genre tropes being completely shattered by the existential and ethical terror of the movie's end as its hook, and for pretty decent stretches, it's only engaging in an autopiloted kind of way. But whew, when you get to the end, boy, that's rough. Grade: B+
Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개) (2000)
Huh. So Bong Joon-ho's debut is this utterly bizarre dark comedy about a man who murders dogs and fights with his wife about whether it is 50 or 100 meters to the corner store. Didn't see that coming. Parts of it are very good (I really like the whole pissing match about the distance to the corner store, which culminates in a very weird toilet-paper-themed setpiece), but the pieces come together into such an ungainly whole that I can't say I enjoyed the experience overall. Also, there's certainly something satirical going on here, but I lack the context to understand what specifically. Grade: C+
Boxcar Bertha (1972)
Scorsese has always had a streak of economic populism, but it's stronger here than I've ever seen it. There are some absolutely all-timer bits here to that end—I'm a big fan of the scene where the big railroad capitalist gets robbed during a meeting in which he boasts about all the money he's made, and then he starts quoting the Bible to the robbers about how they should store up their treasures in heaven instead. Stuff like that is great. Less great: the characters, the pacing, and the whole "Bertha is a magic sex hobo woman" thing that takes up a pretty sizable chunk of the movie. I guess if you're getting money from Corman, ya gotta pay the piper, but still. Grade: B-
Television
Fleabag, Series 1 (2016)
So Phoebe Waller-Bridges created, wrote, and starred in a BBC television adaptation of her own stage play of the same name, and it's fantastic. The premise—in which a thirtysomething Londoner uses sex and unending snark to cope with the death of her mother, the death of her best friend, a toxic immediate family, and some crushing secrets related to all those things—sounds like a miserable experience, and if I tell you, accurately, that Waller-Bridges's protagonist (credited only as "Fleabag") is constantly breaking the fourth wall to smirk at the camera or give a cheeky aside to us viewers, I wouldn't blame you if you took a pass entirely. And the first episode or two definitely gesture toward the sort of painfully edgy series the premise suggests. But in the same way that the early episodes of BoJack Horseman's first season only do justice to the series's rich emotional landscape, to bail on Fleabag after its first episode or to never watch it at all is to miss an indelible work of tragicomedy of the likes I have never seen. It zigs where most shows would zag, its writing cuts effortlessly deep, the cast is tremendous, Waller-Bridges in particular is effervescent, and the finale made me feel in the best way possible like I could not breath. Like I said, the early goings are a little rocky until you can view them in retrospect, but by the end, it's become something magnificent and essential. Grade: A-
Books
Oblivion: Stories by David Foster Wallace (2004)
David Foster Wallace's final short story collection is something of a résumé of Wallace's fiction-writing talents and aspirations. The byzantine corporate structures juxtaposed with drolly satirical speculative elements and bizarre characters of intense obsessions in "Mr. Squishy" recalls Infinite Jest in microcosm; "Incarnations of Burned Children" is a short, intense piece of the sort DFW occasionally rolled out to show off his virtuosic command of the structures of the English language; the confessional masculinity of "Good Old Neon" feels of a piece with the kinds of stories you might find in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; "The Suffering Channel," the novella that closes the collection, is yet another treatise on the intersection of irony, art, and mass media. Short fiction has never been my favorite mode for DFW, but nevertheless, some of these stories are great ("Mr. Squishy," "Good Old Neon"), only a couple are hard to get into beyond the audacity of the premise ("Another Pioneer," "Incarnations of Burned Children"), and most of them are good and worth reading. At least one story involves suicide, which gives the collection an (unintentionally?) morbid biographical appeal, which I'm not a huge fan of, but there's probably not a single piece of DFW's life work that isn't haunted by the fact that he eventually took his own life, so here we are. If we have to view it as the semi-prophetic last look into the living mind of one of the late 20th century's most fascinating writers, it could be a lot worse. Grade: B+
Music
Deerhunter - Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (2019)
It's not like there's nothing to recommend about this album. "Element" is a cock-eyed take on a fun rocker with a singalong chorus; "No One's Sleeping" feels like a lost jangle-pop song from the '80s with a jammy coda; "Greenpoint Gothic" is a moderately interesting instrumental detour. But even those positive moments are ones I ones recommend only half-heartedly, and honestly, y'all, I'm just finding it really hard to muster up any sort of enthusiasm here. It's just a sleepy, mid-tempo indie record from a band that I know as anything but sleepy. Or at least when they are sleepy, they usually have the good sense to give me evocative dreams when I drift off. Here, I'm getting nothing. Grade: C+
Carly Rae Jepsen - Dedicated (2019)
It's hard following up one of the greatest pop albums of the millennium, and Carly Rae Jepsen doesn't try to one-up herself. Dedicated lacks the swing-for-the-fences mega-pop moments like, for example, the exuberant saxophone that opened "Run Away With Me" as if Queen CRJ were entering the city gates riding a unicorn. It even pointedly leaves off some of the poppier singles Jepsen's released in the interim between these two albums, like "Party for One" or "Cut to the Feeling." In place of all that is a slightly dancier, groovier record that's no less full of hooks than Emotion but maybe positions those hooks just a little more cleverly and less immediately: the warbly synth breakdown that greets the final minute of "Julien," the way the melody in "Real Love" pivots from being reminiscent of the "Hush Little Baby" lullaby into the maturely ecstatic mirror image, etc. If Emotion didn't give Jepsen the superstar, headlining status that she deserves, Dedicated is, frustratingly, not going to do that for her either. But it's also a record replete with the kind of sincere, wholesome pop that only Carly Rae is making and for which she absolutely should be given renown on the level of Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande. The fact that that won't happen is pretty much the only disappointment here. Grade: B+
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Please, if you have good cheer for your fellow man in your hearts, don't put any more Adam Sandler movies in there.
Movies
This movie is so bereft of good ideas. Like, I can't think of a single one here. The plot, in which Adam Sandler has to take care of an unaccompanied minor, is full of the stalest "haha, clueless parent does inappropriate things" tropes until it veers into some deep sentimentality, and neither mode works at all. The humor isn't funny, and it's disappointingly short on the madcap energy of something like Billy Madison; Sandler's typical '90s man-child performance is dialed down to a sleepy lull here, which is weird, given that he's playing opposite an actual child, and the few jokes that aren't hinged on this dynamic are bizarrely hung up on shaming Leslie Mann's character for having worked at Hooters. Then the sentiment feels cloying and unearned, not to mention wanting to have its cake and it eat regarding the level of knowing ironic distance from said sentiment. Also, it's a cheap shot because most kid actors are bad, but man alive are Dylan and Cole Sprouse bad here—this is, like, sub-Olsen-Twins-in-Full-House bad. I hope they let both of the Sprouse twins pee on the side of a building with Sandler, though, because that was probably a good time. A better time than I had watching this movie, to be sure. Grade: D+
You would think this would be exactly up my alley: a satirical domestic drama based on recurring motifs from the Bible and the visual arts in a completely audacious way that flirts with sacrilege before landing at deep piety. And when the movie gets to that moment in its final few minutes, it's pretty breathtaking. But the movie is just so suffocatingly affected in its style that I feel a thousand yards away from anything happening in this movie. I enjoyed La Sapienza, writer-director Eugène Green's 2015 feature, but that movie's self-conscious emphasis on architecture made a lot more sense with the static shots and direct camera addresses than the considerably more human subject matter does here. Grade: B-
A somewhat standard crime procedural—a mother must sleuth around to prove her accused son's innocence—until the final fifteen minutes make it something much bleaker and more heartbreaking, as unflinching a stare into the void as I've seen in a while. The movie probably hangs too much on the standard genre tropes being completely shattered by the existential and ethical terror of the movie's end as its hook, and for pretty decent stretches, it's only engaging in an autopiloted kind of way. But whew, when you get to the end, boy, that's rough. Grade: B+
Huh. So Bong Joon-ho's debut is this utterly bizarre dark comedy about a man who murders dogs and fights with his wife about whether it is 50 or 100 meters to the corner store. Didn't see that coming. Parts of it are very good (I really like the whole pissing match about the distance to the corner store, which culminates in a very weird toilet-paper-themed setpiece), but the pieces come together into such an ungainly whole that I can't say I enjoyed the experience overall. Also, there's certainly something satirical going on here, but I lack the context to understand what specifically. Grade: C+
Scorsese has always had a streak of economic populism, but it's stronger here than I've ever seen it. There are some absolutely all-timer bits here to that end—I'm a big fan of the scene where the big railroad capitalist gets robbed during a meeting in which he boasts about all the money he's made, and then he starts quoting the Bible to the robbers about how they should store up their treasures in heaven instead. Stuff like that is great. Less great: the characters, the pacing, and the whole "Bertha is a magic sex hobo woman" thing that takes up a pretty sizable chunk of the movie. I guess if you're getting money from Corman, ya gotta pay the piper, but still. Grade: B-
Television
So Phoebe Waller-Bridges created, wrote, and starred in a BBC television adaptation of her own stage play of the same name, and it's fantastic. The premise—in which a thirtysomething Londoner uses sex and unending snark to cope with the death of her mother, the death of her best friend, a toxic immediate family, and some crushing secrets related to all those things—sounds like a miserable experience, and if I tell you, accurately, that Waller-Bridges's protagonist (credited only as "Fleabag") is constantly breaking the fourth wall to smirk at the camera or give a cheeky aside to us viewers, I wouldn't blame you if you took a pass entirely. And the first episode or two definitely gesture toward the sort of painfully edgy series the premise suggests. But in the same way that the early episodes of BoJack Horseman's first season only do justice to the series's rich emotional landscape, to bail on Fleabag after its first episode or to never watch it at all is to miss an indelible work of tragicomedy of the likes I have never seen. It zigs where most shows would zag, its writing cuts effortlessly deep, the cast is tremendous, Waller-Bridges in particular is effervescent, and the finale made me feel in the best way possible like I could not breath. Like I said, the early goings are a little rocky until you can view them in retrospect, but by the end, it's become something magnificent and essential. Grade: A-
Books
David Foster Wallace's final short story collection is something of a résumé of Wallace's fiction-writing talents and aspirations. The byzantine corporate structures juxtaposed with drolly satirical speculative elements and bizarre characters of intense obsessions in "Mr. Squishy" recalls Infinite Jest in microcosm; "Incarnations of Burned Children" is a short, intense piece of the sort DFW occasionally rolled out to show off his virtuosic command of the structures of the English language; the confessional masculinity of "Good Old Neon" feels of a piece with the kinds of stories you might find in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; "The Suffering Channel," the novella that closes the collection, is yet another treatise on the intersection of irony, art, and mass media. Short fiction has never been my favorite mode for DFW, but nevertheless, some of these stories are great ("Mr. Squishy," "Good Old Neon"), only a couple are hard to get into beyond the audacity of the premise ("Another Pioneer," "Incarnations of Burned Children"), and most of them are good and worth reading. At least one story involves suicide, which gives the collection an (unintentionally?) morbid biographical appeal, which I'm not a huge fan of, but there's probably not a single piece of DFW's life work that isn't haunted by the fact that he eventually took his own life, so here we are. If we have to view it as the semi-prophetic last look into the living mind of one of the late 20th century's most fascinating writers, it could be a lot worse. Grade: B+
Music
It's not like there's nothing to recommend about this album. "Element" is a cock-eyed take on a fun rocker with a singalong chorus; "No One's Sleeping" feels like a lost jangle-pop song from the '80s with a jammy coda; "Greenpoint Gothic" is a moderately interesting instrumental detour. But even those positive moments are ones I ones recommend only half-heartedly, and honestly, y'all, I'm just finding it really hard to muster up any sort of enthusiasm here. It's just a sleepy, mid-tempo indie record from a band that I know as anything but sleepy. Or at least when they are sleepy, they usually have the good sense to give me evocative dreams when I drift off. Here, I'm getting nothing. Grade: C+
It's hard following up one of the greatest pop albums of the millennium, and Carly Rae Jepsen doesn't try to one-up herself. Dedicated lacks the swing-for-the-fences mega-pop moments like, for example, the exuberant saxophone that opened "Run Away With Me" as if Queen CRJ were entering the city gates riding a unicorn. It even pointedly leaves off some of the poppier singles Jepsen's released in the interim between these two albums, like "Party for One" or "Cut to the Feeling." In place of all that is a slightly dancier, groovier record that's no less full of hooks than Emotion but maybe positions those hooks just a little more cleverly and less immediately: the warbly synth breakdown that greets the final minute of "Julien," the way the melody in "Real Love" pivots from being reminiscent of the "Hush Little Baby" lullaby into the maturely ecstatic mirror image, etc. If Emotion didn't give Jepsen the superstar, headlining status that she deserves, Dedicated is, frustratingly, not going to do that for her either. But it's also a record replete with the kind of sincere, wholesome pop that only Carly Rae is making and for which she absolutely should be given renown on the level of Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande. The fact that that won't happen is pretty much the only disappointment here. Grade: B+
Sunday, June 9, 2019
Mini Reviews for June 3-9, 2019
HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Spanglish!
I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to
put in a suggestion for next week (or put in a second one), here's the
link:
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Movies
Spanglish (2004) Reader Suggestion!
There are a lot of well-observed dynamics and moments in Spanglish of the sort that only a smart writer like James L. Brooks could pen. The central relationship between Flor (the Mexican single mother who is ostensibly the movie's protagonist) and her daughter Cristina is the best in show, built on a complex web of tensions regarding class and race and identity and personal psychology specific both to these characters and their larger social milieu of undocumented immigrants, but even smaller-scale bits like how Adam Sandler's character and his daughter share moments of understated, elliptical conversations that communicate a lot more than what is actually said have a great deal of heart and nuance. Unfortunately, the movie has just as many dysfunctional pieces, pieces so ill-conceived that only a writer as comfortable and privileged as James L. Brooks in the mid-2000s could have allowed them past his inner critic, and these begin to crowd out and undermine what should otherwise work well. Téa Leoni works thanklessly and unsuccessfully in a bizarrely and erratically written role as the wife of Sandler's character, John, a role so harpy-ish and shamelessly "hysterical" in the Victorian sense of the word that it flirts with open misogyny, and while Sandler himself gives a pretty strong dramatic performance, John's relationship with Leoni's character—easily the least-interesting and actively bad part of the movie—gets so much screentime that it upstages the much more engaging relationship between Flor and Cristina, to agonizing effect. And I don't think I need to spell out just what is so uncomfortable on a macro-social level about a movie that purports to be the story of an undocumented family but gets distracted and sidelines that family in favor of airing the petty problems of the rich, white family who employs them. And this is all before the romantic tension between John and Flor develops, a would-be affair between employer and employee that is Woody-Allen levels of ick without Woody-Allen levels of wit. These are the worst of the bunch but far from the only things that turn this movie into a gnarled, frustrating mess—a real shame, because the pieces of the movie that are good hint at a much richer, more compelling movie than the movie I found on this library DVD. Grade: C
Long Day's Journey into Night (地球最后的夜晚) (2018)
I recently complained that Kaili Blues, director Bi Gan's previous feature, loses some magic when it transitions into its 40-minute single-take shot in its back half. So by all means, I should be leveling the same complaint against Long Day's Journey into Night, a movie with almost the exact same structure as Kaili Blues, only about forty minutes longer: an opening sixty-ish percent of the movie involving a man's personal search is transformed both thematically and formally by a ridiculously long take that occupies the rest of the movie and that blows the movie's plot up to mythic proportions that accentuate a dream-like geography. And yet here I am, left completely stunned by Long Day's long take (as well as with pretty much everything else here). It's not just that this movie's long take is a much more technically virtuosic feat than Kaili Blues's, though it most certainly is; it's nearly a full hour long and involves the camera following characters into increasingly tricky spaces like a zipline and even the sky itself, to say nothing of the incredibly risky bits of choreography like a character having to make difficult billiard play that show up late in the shot. There are some parts of the shot that actually seem logistically impossible to me, and I have no idea how some of this was filmed. But there's also the substance of the shot itself. Extraordinarily long takes like the one in Kaili Blues or the entirety of Victoria, the single-take German heist film from a few years ago, tend to have a lot of emptiness as characters move in transit from location to location, which results in these takes often becoming about the spaces in between the shots of a conventionally edited scene. The characters in Long Day's shot spend a lot of time in transit as well, but part of the magic of what Gan accomplishes is that every moment of this shot feels like a piece of a real scene with form and function, without any of the dead air that often accompanies intense shot length. All this comes together to make the magic of Gan's camera movement merge with the literal magic we see onscreen to make the single most mystical and transcendent hour of cinema I've experienced all year. And that's not even bringing up the first 80 minutes of the movie, which, while consisting of more conventional shot lengths, is its own kind of magical cinematic experience, its editing cutting across time and space in a way that's mesmerizing. Like Andrei Tarkovsky before him, Gan takes the central plot of this movie (straight out of a classic Hollywood film, a man searching for his lost love) and builds it from time sculpted into striking shapes and images molded into psychologically and spiritually profound frames. In a manner not unlike Nostalghia or Mirror, Long Day languishes on those thin places where the boundaries between our own material world and the world of transcendent spirituality become porous; it's very much an Art Film, but like the films of Tarkovsky, there's a gut-feeling immediacy to this movie entrancingly sensual style that both rewards intellect and also makes that sort of chin-stroking entirely unnecessary in the face of such a majestic audio-visual experience. I was swept away. My favorite film of the year so far by a considerable margin. Grade: A
Greta (2018)
A fun thriller with a tremendous central performance by Isabelle Hupert. A lot of Neil Jordan's normal florid directorial flourishes have been honed down to simple, mean neo-noir edges, which suits this movie just fine—a simple, mean neo-noir itself, about which there isn't a lot surprising other than just how solidly executed everything is. It's a little distracting how it justifies Chloë Grace Moretz's character's naivety by acting like Boston is some down-home backwater where people are good and kind and trusting ("Where I'm from, we return lost purses," is a real line that she says, and when it's finally revealed that it's Boston and not, like, Sweetwater, Tennessee, I almost fell out of my chair), and the movie walks a razor's edge of being tropey enough to be comfortable and too tropey to be engaging, but in the end, its feet are planted pretty firmly in the right places. Grade: B
Climax (2018)
I don't hate this like I hated Enter the Void, mostly because 1) it is an hour shorter than Enter the Void, and 2) the early dance scenes are some of the most hypnotic filmmaking I've seen all year. But I still don't like the movie as a whole. It shares that same faux-profound cinematic flexing that made Enter the Void noxious at 161 minutes (*bong hit* "What if the last ten minutes of the movie were, like, upside-down, maaaaan"), as well as the same dead-end, performative nihilism and provocateurism. I realize that the dissonance between the sensory euphoria of the first half of the movie and the hellish cinematic assault of the back half of the movie is kind of The Point (ominous title cards tell us, alternatingly, that "Birth is an interesting opportunity" and "Death is an interesting opportunity"), but I resent that being The Point, especially when it's in service of such a doggedly myopic and unimaginative philosophy of birth and death. And especially when I have to watch *spoilers* a pregnant woman kicked in the stomach until she miscarries, solely for the shock value. Wow, what a brilliant subversion of the dichotomy of birth and death Gaspar you've really done it this time mind blown this might be your masterpiece oh my gawd so deep bro why can't all filmmakers be deep auteurs like you. Grade: C
24 Frames (2017)
The last film by the late, great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is one of his most experimental. Consisting of just 24 shots, each a mostly static image with a few (often digitally superimposed) moving pieces, it's an obvious play on the fundamental building blocks of cinema itself, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, with the starkness of each image contrasting wonderfully with the life communicated by the movement and immersive sound design. It's oddly engaging, too, given its component parts; the premise makes this movie sound non-narrative, but Kiarostami slyly curates small stories within each shot, presenting wordless conflicts among its mostly animal cast that develop and then resolve in the space of each shot's 4.5 minutes. Even without these conflicts, though, I think I would have still found this mesmerizing. With its often obvious digital superimposition and ambient natural sound, 24 Frames strongly recalls '90s PC CD-ROM point-and-click games/edutainment in a way that I found deeply relaxing. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call this movie a naturalistic adaptation of, say, Myst, or at least the vibes of a game like that, and watching this unearthed some very dear memories of sitting on the floor just staring at screensavers or the looping FMV of game waiting for a click input. This is a completely subjective reaction to this movie, I know, but whatever. Objectivity in art is an illusion, even with something as "objective" as a static image. Grade: B+
35 Shots of Rum (35 rhums) (2008)
This film's characters are so gloriously full of life that I'm disappointed that they aren't contextualized within a story that I found more engaging. The elliptical nature of the film's storytelling is definitely an intentional choice on the part of Claire Denis, and I understand why that choice was made, but it routinely did not work for me. People are going to tell me I'm wrong, and I probably am, because this is the most pedestrian critique ever to make of a movie, but I do think I would have been more engaged if the plot were just a hair more propulsive and cohesive. The reason I know I am probably wrong is that my favorite pieces of the movie—and, to be clear, these pieces are resplendent—are the least-plotty ones: the late-night party set to the Commodores' "Nightshift," the strike/protest bits, the shots of the pressure cooker. Part of me wishes that the movie committed to a complete lack of forward narrative, though that would probably break the movie entirely. Anyway, I feel really weird about High Life now being my highest-rated of the four Denis pictures I've seen, since in some ways, it's the least-interesting. But I dunno. Taste is a fickle friend, and it's the only one of her movies I've seen where I've not been periodically restless. Maybe I just like spaceships. Grade: B
Birthright (1939)
Oscar Micheaux's talkie remake of his (now lost) silent film of the same name is stilted and ham-fisted, and its plot is bonkers in the sense that it just careens from point to point without much regard for structure. In most regards, this is pretty tedious, though at times, it's kind of wild and delightful in its blunt-force craft. There are, in particular, a few line readings by some evil white dudes that are all-timers, my favorite being the way one chortles, "Let's have a Coca-Cola!" in celebration of a black man being swindled (honorable mention to the other evil white guy who convinces a black man to "let [his] seed wither" rather than marry a black woman). The movie has a real "no-B.S." policy when it comes to the racist South, and this is particularly refreshing when it comes to cutting through all the pretense of the stock phrases of Southern politeness to reveal the racism often masked underneath—even if it takes turning characters into mustache-twirling villains to do it! Grade: B-
Television
SpongeBob SquarePants, Season 3 (2001-2004)
It's SpongeBob; whaddya need, a road map? Its production being interrupted by the development of the 2004 theatrical film, the third season feels a little more reliant on the time-wasting Patchy the Pirate segments and gimmick episodes like "The Lost Episode" than previous seasons. But the average quality here is still insanely high, and there are some absolutely classic episodes in the season, including "Chocolate with Nuts" and "Ugh" (i.e. SpongeBob B.C.). This season (and the feature film that followed it) represent the end of that fevered first era of SpongeBob (and in fact, it was initially the planned ending of the show), after which the tone of the show changed somewhat, and as such, it feels like a finale of sorts. And it's a fitting finale, if only a temporary one. Grade: A-
Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!
Movies
There are a lot of well-observed dynamics and moments in Spanglish of the sort that only a smart writer like James L. Brooks could pen. The central relationship between Flor (the Mexican single mother who is ostensibly the movie's protagonist) and her daughter Cristina is the best in show, built on a complex web of tensions regarding class and race and identity and personal psychology specific both to these characters and their larger social milieu of undocumented immigrants, but even smaller-scale bits like how Adam Sandler's character and his daughter share moments of understated, elliptical conversations that communicate a lot more than what is actually said have a great deal of heart and nuance. Unfortunately, the movie has just as many dysfunctional pieces, pieces so ill-conceived that only a writer as comfortable and privileged as James L. Brooks in the mid-2000s could have allowed them past his inner critic, and these begin to crowd out and undermine what should otherwise work well. Téa Leoni works thanklessly and unsuccessfully in a bizarrely and erratically written role as the wife of Sandler's character, John, a role so harpy-ish and shamelessly "hysterical" in the Victorian sense of the word that it flirts with open misogyny, and while Sandler himself gives a pretty strong dramatic performance, John's relationship with Leoni's character—easily the least-interesting and actively bad part of the movie—gets so much screentime that it upstages the much more engaging relationship between Flor and Cristina, to agonizing effect. And I don't think I need to spell out just what is so uncomfortable on a macro-social level about a movie that purports to be the story of an undocumented family but gets distracted and sidelines that family in favor of airing the petty problems of the rich, white family who employs them. And this is all before the romantic tension between John and Flor develops, a would-be affair between employer and employee that is Woody-Allen levels of ick without Woody-Allen levels of wit. These are the worst of the bunch but far from the only things that turn this movie into a gnarled, frustrating mess—a real shame, because the pieces of the movie that are good hint at a much richer, more compelling movie than the movie I found on this library DVD. Grade: C
I recently complained that Kaili Blues, director Bi Gan's previous feature, loses some magic when it transitions into its 40-minute single-take shot in its back half. So by all means, I should be leveling the same complaint against Long Day's Journey into Night, a movie with almost the exact same structure as Kaili Blues, only about forty minutes longer: an opening sixty-ish percent of the movie involving a man's personal search is transformed both thematically and formally by a ridiculously long take that occupies the rest of the movie and that blows the movie's plot up to mythic proportions that accentuate a dream-like geography. And yet here I am, left completely stunned by Long Day's long take (as well as with pretty much everything else here). It's not just that this movie's long take is a much more technically virtuosic feat than Kaili Blues's, though it most certainly is; it's nearly a full hour long and involves the camera following characters into increasingly tricky spaces like a zipline and even the sky itself, to say nothing of the incredibly risky bits of choreography like a character having to make difficult billiard play that show up late in the shot. There are some parts of the shot that actually seem logistically impossible to me, and I have no idea how some of this was filmed. But there's also the substance of the shot itself. Extraordinarily long takes like the one in Kaili Blues or the entirety of Victoria, the single-take German heist film from a few years ago, tend to have a lot of emptiness as characters move in transit from location to location, which results in these takes often becoming about the spaces in between the shots of a conventionally edited scene. The characters in Long Day's shot spend a lot of time in transit as well, but part of the magic of what Gan accomplishes is that every moment of this shot feels like a piece of a real scene with form and function, without any of the dead air that often accompanies intense shot length. All this comes together to make the magic of Gan's camera movement merge with the literal magic we see onscreen to make the single most mystical and transcendent hour of cinema I've experienced all year. And that's not even bringing up the first 80 minutes of the movie, which, while consisting of more conventional shot lengths, is its own kind of magical cinematic experience, its editing cutting across time and space in a way that's mesmerizing. Like Andrei Tarkovsky before him, Gan takes the central plot of this movie (straight out of a classic Hollywood film, a man searching for his lost love) and builds it from time sculpted into striking shapes and images molded into psychologically and spiritually profound frames. In a manner not unlike Nostalghia or Mirror, Long Day languishes on those thin places where the boundaries between our own material world and the world of transcendent spirituality become porous; it's very much an Art Film, but like the films of Tarkovsky, there's a gut-feeling immediacy to this movie entrancingly sensual style that both rewards intellect and also makes that sort of chin-stroking entirely unnecessary in the face of such a majestic audio-visual experience. I was swept away. My favorite film of the year so far by a considerable margin. Grade: A
A fun thriller with a tremendous central performance by Isabelle Hupert. A lot of Neil Jordan's normal florid directorial flourishes have been honed down to simple, mean neo-noir edges, which suits this movie just fine—a simple, mean neo-noir itself, about which there isn't a lot surprising other than just how solidly executed everything is. It's a little distracting how it justifies Chloë Grace Moretz's character's naivety by acting like Boston is some down-home backwater where people are good and kind and trusting ("Where I'm from, we return lost purses," is a real line that she says, and when it's finally revealed that it's Boston and not, like, Sweetwater, Tennessee, I almost fell out of my chair), and the movie walks a razor's edge of being tropey enough to be comfortable and too tropey to be engaging, but in the end, its feet are planted pretty firmly in the right places. Grade: B
I don't hate this like I hated Enter the Void, mostly because 1) it is an hour shorter than Enter the Void, and 2) the early dance scenes are some of the most hypnotic filmmaking I've seen all year. But I still don't like the movie as a whole. It shares that same faux-profound cinematic flexing that made Enter the Void noxious at 161 minutes (*bong hit* "What if the last ten minutes of the movie were, like, upside-down, maaaaan"), as well as the same dead-end, performative nihilism and provocateurism. I realize that the dissonance between the sensory euphoria of the first half of the movie and the hellish cinematic assault of the back half of the movie is kind of The Point (ominous title cards tell us, alternatingly, that "Birth is an interesting opportunity" and "Death is an interesting opportunity"), but I resent that being The Point, especially when it's in service of such a doggedly myopic and unimaginative philosophy of birth and death. And especially when I have to watch *spoilers* a pregnant woman kicked in the stomach until she miscarries, solely for the shock value. Wow, what a brilliant subversion of the dichotomy of birth and death Gaspar you've really done it this time mind blown this might be your masterpiece oh my gawd so deep bro why can't all filmmakers be deep auteurs like you. Grade: C
The last film by the late, great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is one of his most experimental. Consisting of just 24 shots, each a mostly static image with a few (often digitally superimposed) moving pieces, it's an obvious play on the fundamental building blocks of cinema itself, and a strikingly beautiful one at that, with the starkness of each image contrasting wonderfully with the life communicated by the movement and immersive sound design. It's oddly engaging, too, given its component parts; the premise makes this movie sound non-narrative, but Kiarostami slyly curates small stories within each shot, presenting wordless conflicts among its mostly animal cast that develop and then resolve in the space of each shot's 4.5 minutes. Even without these conflicts, though, I think I would have still found this mesmerizing. With its often obvious digital superimposition and ambient natural sound, 24 Frames strongly recalls '90s PC CD-ROM point-and-click games/edutainment in a way that I found deeply relaxing. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to call this movie a naturalistic adaptation of, say, Myst, or at least the vibes of a game like that, and watching this unearthed some very dear memories of sitting on the floor just staring at screensavers or the looping FMV of game waiting for a click input. This is a completely subjective reaction to this movie, I know, but whatever. Objectivity in art is an illusion, even with something as "objective" as a static image. Grade: B+
This film's characters are so gloriously full of life that I'm disappointed that they aren't contextualized within a story that I found more engaging. The elliptical nature of the film's storytelling is definitely an intentional choice on the part of Claire Denis, and I understand why that choice was made, but it routinely did not work for me. People are going to tell me I'm wrong, and I probably am, because this is the most pedestrian critique ever to make of a movie, but I do think I would have been more engaged if the plot were just a hair more propulsive and cohesive. The reason I know I am probably wrong is that my favorite pieces of the movie—and, to be clear, these pieces are resplendent—are the least-plotty ones: the late-night party set to the Commodores' "Nightshift," the strike/protest bits, the shots of the pressure cooker. Part of me wishes that the movie committed to a complete lack of forward narrative, though that would probably break the movie entirely. Anyway, I feel really weird about High Life now being my highest-rated of the four Denis pictures I've seen, since in some ways, it's the least-interesting. But I dunno. Taste is a fickle friend, and it's the only one of her movies I've seen where I've not been periodically restless. Maybe I just like spaceships. Grade: B
Oscar Micheaux's talkie remake of his (now lost) silent film of the same name is stilted and ham-fisted, and its plot is bonkers in the sense that it just careens from point to point without much regard for structure. In most regards, this is pretty tedious, though at times, it's kind of wild and delightful in its blunt-force craft. There are, in particular, a few line readings by some evil white dudes that are all-timers, my favorite being the way one chortles, "Let's have a Coca-Cola!" in celebration of a black man being swindled (honorable mention to the other evil white guy who convinces a black man to "let [his] seed wither" rather than marry a black woman). The movie has a real "no-B.S." policy when it comes to the racist South, and this is particularly refreshing when it comes to cutting through all the pretense of the stock phrases of Southern politeness to reveal the racism often masked underneath—even if it takes turning characters into mustache-twirling villains to do it! Grade: B-
Television
It's SpongeBob; whaddya need, a road map? Its production being interrupted by the development of the 2004 theatrical film, the third season feels a little more reliant on the time-wasting Patchy the Pirate segments and gimmick episodes like "The Lost Episode" than previous seasons. But the average quality here is still insanely high, and there are some absolutely classic episodes in the season, including "Chocolate with Nuts" and "Ugh" (i.e. SpongeBob B.C.). This season (and the feature film that followed it) represent the end of that fevered first era of SpongeBob (and in fact, it was initially the planned ending of the show), after which the tone of the show changed somewhat, and as such, it feels like a finale of sorts. And it's a fitting finale, if only a temporary one. Grade: A-
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
Interview: Jake Ward, aka Jaek Wrad
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| Jake Ward, aka Jaek Wrad (right) |
I spend a lot of time talking about the arts on this blog, but most of the works I discuss are by faraway, almost abstract people I have never talked to in real life. I mean, I'd love to be best buds with Björk, but that's just not the hand life's dealt me. However, I do know a lot of people who are artists in some capacity: musicians, poets, fiction writers, painters, etc. This raises the question of why I don't talk about these folks and their work on my blog. So I'm trying something new here. I'm going to start what I hope will become a recurring feature in which I interview my artist friends. And now you're reading the first one!
Bear with me; I've never conducted a formal interview before, so this may be a mess. If it is a mess, that's my own lack of experience showing; my friends are vibrant, intelligent people who have lots of interesting things to say. And my good friend Jake Ward is the first one to brave my greenhorn interview skills. Thanks, Jake!
I've known Jake Ward for almost six years. We were in the same graduate cohort in the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's master's program in English Literature and Creative Writing. He lives in Indianapolis now with his wife, Emily, but we still keep in touch, which speaks to how nifty this guy is; I am rarely dedicated enough to keep in touch with someone long-distance.
Jake's day job is as a high school English teacher, but by night, he is a multi-instrumentalist musician who goes by the moniker "Jaek Wrad" on the mean streets of the internet. He has one album out, which you can hear over at his Bandcamp page; he's also currently working on a crazy-ambitious stage musical based on the life of King David from the Bible. We talk about all this and more in the interview. He's a very cool cat, and I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed conducting it.
Interview
Michael: So tell me the story of “Jaek Wrad.”
Jake: It’s not that good of a story, I don’t think.
When I was in high school, my girlfriend was like, “You have to get a Facebook.
It’d be so cool, and you’re going to college.” She was a year behind me, and so
she wasn’t going to college. I was being immature and stubborn and being like,
“No, I’m not going to get it.” My sister had said Facebook wasn’t cool. The
cool thing was MySpace; that’s what all the cool people did. I don’t know why I
didn’t want a Facebook, but it just seemed like a cultural trend that I wanted
to fight. But I got one very reluctantly and hastily, and I typed my name in
wrong.
M: [laughs] Both your first and last names?
J: No, I only did the “Jaek,” but then I was like,
“Oops, who cares?” and submitted it anyway. It stayed like that a long time. I
think until I got married, which would have been about six years. Then [my
wife] Emily made me change it back. I think at some point in those six years, I
decided, “If I spelled my last name differently, too, it sounds like ‘rad.’ I
don’t know why I thought it was cool, but I just did it, and even I was aware
that this was kind of stupid. But I just left it.
M: Were you ever on MySpace?
J: I did have a MySpace. I just never really did
anything with it because you could customize the background and do all these
other features, and I didn’t know how to do them, and I didn’t want to take the
time to do them. It just didn’t seem worth my time. So I didn’t do it. [laughs]
M: So you didn’t put music on MySpace or anything
like that?
J: No, I didn’t have any music at that time. As far
as stuff I played back then, it would just be covers, so I didn’t post any of
that, or anyone else’s music either.
M: So speaking of which, your music--you’ve just
released the one album, right? And it’s on Bandcamp?
J: Yes.
M: Cool. So what’s your take on where music
distribution is right now?
J: As far as my personal choices, I still like CDs.
I’ve made some exceptions on Bandcamp for things that were only digital but
that I thought sounded cool. But I do like CDs. I just bought five CDs at a
library book sale last night. It’s kind of stupid, because I’ll still end up
putting them on my computer and then putting them on my phone so that I always
have them, like streaming, but I want to own the physical thing because I’m
paranoid about losing something that Amazon or Apple gave me. If I like it a
lot, then I want to own it.
M: What do you think is different about owning it? Is
it just that some corporation could take it away?
J: Well, part of it is that even though I have a lot
of CDs, I still have a limited number of CDs, and I can focus on those. I guess
I could do this on Spotify, too, and it might happen more naturally, where I
would just listen to the things I remember to listen to over and over again.
But if I own the CD, it’ll be in my car, and I’ll listen to it three or four
times at least before I put another CD in there. I like that. I think I just
get overwhelmed when there are too many choices. There are nights when Emily’s
not here, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I could watch anything,” and I sit there
and scroll through all the Netflix options for long enough that I just get
tired of dealing with it, and I end up reading a book instead because I can’t
make up my mind. It’s a serious problem sometimes. It’s the same reason I like
to go to the library and rent some movies, or sometimes I’ll go to Family
Video, because we still have one of those [Editorial Update: in the time
between the conducting of this interview and its publication, Jake’s Family
Video announced that it would be closing]. If I know that I only have four days
to watch it, it just makes the decision for you, and it’s a lot less
emotionally trying. I think that’s part of why I like having the CDs. I also
just like the idea of libraries. I own a lot of books because I just like
seeing them on the shelf. Maybe it’s just consumerism.
M: On the subject of libraries, you and I both have
graduate degrees in English from the University of Tennessee, and you studied
philosophy as an undergraduate, right?
J: Yeah. I always feel like I’m not qualified to say
I majored in philosophy, but yes, I was a philosophy student.
M: Is your academic background something you draw on
when you’re making music?
J: I’m sure what I’ve read and studied affects how I
perceive what I’m doing. I don’t consciously know that I’m drawing on any art
theories or literary critical theories with what I’m writing. I do think with a
lot of what I’ve read of fiction and literary criticism, what little I do know,
does influence the way I understand what’s happening when I’m writing something
and thinking about what listeners are going to pick up and think about. Music
is still a pretty different situation from fiction, though.
M: What would you say are the big foundations that
you’re drawing on that aren’t literary?
J: Well, before I answer that, I do want to say that
you can probably tell that I had an interest in philosophy because of my
approach to music. I’m really interested in deeper meaning, and sometimes I
have trouble just telling a story that is a nice story that makes you feel
something, that has some life in it. That’s what most of the art I like does.
But when I’m making something, I feel like I have to put in this layer of
understanding about what’s at the foundation of the world, what undergirds reality
for me, and there has to be some formal plan for the music, and it has to make
sense in my head. But I’ve also been fighting that, because when I get down to
it, when I listen to music, I just want it to sound good. So I’m fighting
myself in a way. But that’s how you can probably tell that I was interested in
philosophy. I just read Gödel, Escher, Bach. Have you heard of that
book?
M: I don’t think I know anything about it except the
title.
J: I had no idea what it was about before I read it
either. But the author talks about bringing Bach into these formal systems.
He’s a computer science guy working on artificial intelligence. I think that’s
been affecting me lately.
M: The next question I have is about your first
album, which is on Bandcamp: Draw, Jaek. That album is fairly lyrically
intense in the sense that the way your lyrics work, they don’t lend themselves
to conventional storytelling like you were talking about. Your songs don’t
really follow verse-chorus-verse structure and things like that. If you look at
the lyrics on the page, they have the feel of written poetry rather than song
lyrics. You’ve already said a little bit about this, but what’s your
songwriting process? How do lyrics and music intersect?
J: I don’t really have one process, and I feel like
I’m still working out what my process should be. In the past, I’ve just been
going for a walk or I’m in my car and I just think of something that I think is
an interesting idea, and I’ll write it down, so I’ll end up with all these tiny
one-sentence things in my notebook. Sometimes they end up longer, and I’ll
sometimes write a few stanzas in one sitting, and those will be the ones that I
feel like I can actually use, as opposed to the one-sentence ones where I’m like,
“This is a cool sentence, but I don’t know how to extend it.” And then I’ll try
to extend it, and I’ll be like, “No, this sucks. I’m not interested in this.”
When I try to consciously control that, it doesn’t end up working super well,
which frustrates me a lot. You hear people say, “You just gotta work hard, you
gotta sit down every day as a writer and just write.” I try that, too, and
sometimes I can develop what I worked on the previous day. But a lot of times,
I’ll just have this kernel of a cool idea that I can’t seem to develop into
anything I’m happy about, and I feel like I just ruin it when I impose on it. I
have a hard time getting to music. I think what usually happens is I just have
all these things written in my notebook, and then I have all these musical
things I’ve been working with, like my looper pedal, where I’ll just play
something random that I think sounds cool. So whatever two things I happen to
be working on at the same time, I’ll just try them out with each other and see
which ones work. That’s often all it is.
M: So on your music--what instruments do you actually
play?
J: I started my musical path with the violin in 7th
grade. I learned piano; I’m not great at piano, but I can play it. I play
guitar. I own a banjo--I don’t think that’s on the album. I think that’s it. If
there are any drums [on the album], I just programmed them in on Garage Band. I
don’t own a drum set, though I’ve always wanted to.
M: If you were going to add another instrument to
your repertoire, what would it be? Is it drums?
J: I dunno. Drums would be really cool, but I don’t
have a place in my house for drums, and I’m sure Emily would hate us having a
drum set. That’s a logistical problem. Until I get to the point where I have a
studio, it’s just not convenient to use drums. I don’t know what my next
instrument would be. Honestly, I just got this Moog semimodular synthesizer,
which I’m super fascinated with. I’m fascinated by synthesizer sounds, so I’m
trying to learn how to use this better. So that’s probably my instrument.
M: Okay, here’s a typical interview question: who’s
influencing you?
J: Musically, especially on that last album, Sufjan
Stevens is just an enormous influence on me. For so many things that he did, I
was at the right age at the right time that I just latched onto his techniques.
There’s something kind of magical about his layered tracks.
M: He’s got a lot of different styles. Is there a
particular Sufjan that is most impactful to you?
J: On my album, it was the Illinois album.
“The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades,” that song has a couple different vocal
tracks, almost in a round, and there are little lines of strings and a drum,
and just all this different stuff happening. When I use the word “magical,” I’m
talking about songs like that. I don’t know that I got to that energy level,
but I like that idea of multiple lines that are intertwined.
M: He’s got a whole ensemble, whereas you’re a
one-man show.
J: Yeah, I’ve never really worked with other people.
I’ve always wanted to, especially now that I’m married and have a job and my
friends are married and/or live far away and have kids. It would be cool to
have a team. I don’t know, though. I feel like I’m really deferential, like,
“Whatever you guys want to do.” I would have strong opinions, but I would have
a hard time working them in, and I would just be frustrated all the time.
M: Anyway, I cut you off about your influences.
J: Well, as far as Sufjan goes, one of the things
that drew me to him is that he usually is doing so many different things,
whereas on my album, I probably am only doing one thing. Right now, after the
album, I’m worried that whenever I try to do something new, it’ll just be the
same thing that I’ve always done, so I’m trying hard to do different harmonies
and use different strategies. Besides Sufjan Stevens, I feel like whatever I’m
listening to or reading has a big impact on me. Like I said, that Gödel,
Escher, Bach book made me want to write a fugue, because that’s what Bach
does, and I tried to do that; I wrote simple one that I put into a song as part
of a first movement of something that I’m working on.
M: Hey, you’ve got a Moog synthesizer. Maybe you’re
just Emerson, Lake & Palmer. What are you listening to right now, since
that influences you?
J: When I went to the record store the other day, I
got an album by Brian Eno. Another Green World.
M: I think David Foster Wallace really liked that
one.
J: So I had just read Although of Course You End
Up Becoming Yourself.
M: Is that the book that was adapted into The End
of the Tour?
J: Yeah. I read that in two days. It’s just a
transcript of David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace talking. It’s basically
like watching the movie, without having to consider whether Jason Segel is
doing a good job of being DFW. But anyway, I devoured that. And he just
mentions Another Green World once, just a song from that album, and I
thought, “I should listen to more Brian Eno,” because I had just heard some of
his ambient stuff, which was interesting, but I think I like a little more
clear structure and songiness. So I’ve listened to that a bunch of times, because
it’s in my car now. I also bought Devo’s first album, Are We Not Men? I
learned a cover of one of the songs the other day and played it at an open mic.
M: To the extent that you post on Facebook, it seems
like you’re doing a lot of open mic and live music.
J: I’ve been trying to go every week. That helps me
stay a little grounded and makes me keep playing my guitar. It’s really easy
for me to not practice my instrument, since I’m more interested in making
things than in just being a performer. Performing is what I hated about
studying music, just going to violin lessons and having to practice this Mozart
concerto a thousand times. So it’s good if I force myself to play an instrument
and put into my fingers stuff that other people have written, to get a sense of
it. It also just gets me out there playing in front of people. Even though it’s
usually just the same two old guys who are there, who are awesome, and then a
bunch of strangers who are usually pretty ambivalent about the fact that they
showed up on open mic night.
M: So your next project that I know you’re working on
is that you’re creating a stage musical, and obviously that has a live
component, or you’re at least anticipating one. How’s that different from your
first album, which was conceived as studio music?
J: I don’t know if I currently intend for it ever to
be a live performance [laughs]. I’m basically just stealing everything I’ve
heard about Hamilton. Lin-Manuel Miranda said he’d just planned on it
being a concept album, and that’s basically all I have in mind: to have a story
that’s already been told, so I don’t have to come up with the plot and figure
out what happens. I obviously still have to be creative in what I draw out of
that story, but I just wanted a big story that I could just dive into and not
worry about the foundation, so I could just focus on the music and the way I
told the story. My intention is that I would have other people and voice the
parts, but that’s about as ambitious as I was intending to be with it.
M: So would you consider this project any different
from Pink Floyd’s The Wall or any of the really famous narrative concept
albums?
J: I would say I’m basically doing that. The Wall
is cool in that if you just listened to the album and didn’t watch the movie,
it’s a little more subtle and more inventive and concise in how it tells the
story compared to what I’ve been doing. I don’t think I’m doing it as well as The
Wall. Mine is a lot more linear. But otherwise, I would say that yeah, I
just consider it a concept album. I love music that tells stories, even though
I’m not as good at writing the stories. I’m trying to help that by taking a
story that already exists and telling that story.
M: Speaking of the story, it’s about King David in
the Bible, right? It’s an adaptation of the books of Samuel in the Bible,
right?
J: Yes.
M: Why that particular story?
J: Every story has something important and
meaningful. There are a thousand stories out there that I could have picked
that I would have had something meaningful to say about, but I feel like
there’s some urge in me to go to the bottom of some sort of foundational,
most-important story in my mind, and in the Bible, this one is pretty central.
I’ve grown up with the sense that the Bible is foundational in this important
way. We didn’t grow up going to church, but it always seemed like the
book, and in some sense the story, with David as a type of Christ. I’m
probably just being pretentious, but I just felt that if I’m going to devote
myself to this, shouldn’t it be something that really matters, and not just
some story that really grabbed me and then two days later I didn’t care about
anymore?
M: What’s it like adapting the Bible? You and I are
both practicing Christians, so obviously, we both have long histories with the
story, which makes it a little bit different than, say, adapting a novel.
J: It’s been weird. Part of it is trying to make it
not written in Christian code. I’m trying to reach an audience that isn’t just
Christian. It’s been a challenge because I’m adapting the Bible, and one way or
another, people are coming with a lot of preconceived notions, so I’m trying to
fight against those a little bit. I don’t think I changed anything [from the
Bible] too much, though. I think I’ve been pretty loyal to my understanding of
the Bible. There is a lot of stuff that I just jettisoned because it was just
too much, but I don’t feel like that’s changing the heart of the story. At
least not in a blasphemous sense. There are certain verses or phrases or
descriptions of David that are in the Bible multiple times or that have become
iconic that I wanted to hit. I’m trying to think of what those are right now.
M: Well, David and Goliath.
J: Yeah, but I guess I was thinking more word phrases
that I’m trying to tap into and draw out musically. But yeah, those stories
where you know that people are going to know that story already, too. There’s
some cultural knowledge you can tap into, which can be helpful. But that’s not
because it’s just the Bible; it’s because it’s David and Goliath.
M: Does any of that feel restrictive? For example,
you talk about people coming with preconceived notions, and the Bible is so
weighted with literal history and also personal and cultural histories for
people. Do you worry about adapting it because of how that baggage may
interplay with how people react to your music?
J: I’m not sure. You mean that someone might peg me
as someone who writes Christian music or something?
M: That, but also, people have been told the David
and Goliath story since they were three or whatever, so there’s a particular
version of that story that’s cemented in people’s minds because of how
ubiquitous it became in culture, rather than what the source text is. I just
feel like there are a lot of ways in which the Bible has become so ubiquitous
that it has all these narratives and implications put on it that you have to
navigate when you go back to the source text.
J: I feel like I haven’t been very aware of what
everybody thinks this story means when I’ve been doing this project. Maybe
that’s more of a result of ignorance on my part. I’ve grown up with the
stories, but I don’t have a sense of hearing other people talk about the
stories, except, you know, David and Goliath. I’ve just gone with what moved me
in the story and what seemed important or interesting to me in the story. And
honestly, if I came out of this with a straightforward, boring telling of the
story but that was fun to listen to, I think I would say it was a huge success
[laughs]. My goal would be that plotwise, it was engaging and interesting and
dramatically moving. But… I mean, I started out trying to write fiction. That’s
what I wanted to do, but I always felt like I was terrible at it. I just
immediately hated everything I wrote, I felt like I had no idea what to do, I
didn’t know how to tell a story. But there’s something about music where I at
least know some things about how this is formally supposed to work. I’ve heard
enough music that I know what a song sounds like and when I want something to
sound like a song. And if it sounds like a song that’s fun to listen to, I did
something, at least.
M: You mentioned earlier as being pegged as a
Christian artist. And there are a lot of Christian artists out there, most
visibly with the commercial worship scene, contemporary Christian music, and
that sort of thing. Your music’s not that, at least not the way it
sounds. I think a lot of people who didn’t grown up with Christian music tend
to dislike that music anyway. But are there Christian musicians out there that
are interesting to you?
J: I know I listened to Relient K a lot when I was in
high school. They were a band that it was cool to like in high school, and some
of their later stuff I think is really good. I think they’re better than some
of the Christian music out there.
M: Are they still making music? I’ve not kept up with
Relient K at all.
J: They had an album [Collapsible Lung] where
they moved in a really poppy direction, and maybe they were already doing this,
but I heard there was somebody else writing their songs on that album. I don’t
know why that was a big deal to me, because they were already making poppy
songs. But there was something funny and quirky about them that I felt was
getting smoothed over to make them more commercially appealing. You know, some
hipster reason about how they “sold out” or whatever. I listened to that album
once, and it was like, “This is okay.” Probably says more about me than them.
Anyway, my only other answer is Sufjan again. I have heard him say that he
doesn’t think music or his public presentation of music is a place for him to
discuss his faith--in some sort of proselytizing sense, is what I think he
meant. That made a lot of sense to me, but also, I always think that you can’t
help but let that into your music. This has been said by a couple people
before, but if you are a Christian and you are making art, then that is what
Christian art is; it doesn’t have to be a praise song that would be sung in
church for it to be Christian. So in that sense, I’m interested in a lot of
what Sufjan does through the lens of him being a Christian who did this. And
maybe it’s not always about his faith, but at least it was something important
to him. I don’t even know what denomination he is or how important his faith is
to him at this point in his life, but I think at least in some songs, his faith
comes out.
M: In Illinois, he’s got some songs that are
explicit about that.
J: Oh yeah, especially earlier. There’s that Seven
Swans album. And in The Age of Adz, that last song, “Impossible
Soul,” which is like 25 minutes long, works pretty well as an allegory for our
relationship as humans, who are sinful, with God. I listened to that a lot of
times before it occurred to me that maybe that had any religious meaning, but
when it did, I thought that was cool because it wasn’t overtly about that. It was
just a good song, but it could also mean something to me on that religious
level about my relationship with God. I don’t know if he intended that, but it
does mean something to me now.
You can listen to / buy Jake's first album, Draw, Jaek, at his Bandcamp page and follow him on Facebook here.
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