Prog Progress 1983: Marillion - Script for a Jester's Tear

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

Over the past few posts, I've made a few passing references to "neo-progressive rock." Neo-prog is basically a prog revival; as a bunch of the bands in the original prog wave pivoted toward pop, new wave, and arena rock, a group of younger musicians who had grown up on the '70s prog canon decided that they actually still liked progressive rock a lot, so they picked up the torch and started making their own music in the style of Genesis and Yes (and a few other bands, but mostly those two), with a shade of modern '80s production. And so here we are, in 1983, at the dawn of that whole movement. And so we have Marillion. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, indeed.

There are neo-prog records before 1983: Twelfth Night (a major neo-prog band) had released a couple albums by 1983, and IQ (another big deal in the movement) had released a demo the previous year. But in the same way that King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King in 1969 signaled a watershed moment for progressive rock's first wave, when O.G. prog truly came into its own, the release of Script for a Jester's Tear is very much a coming out for the neo-prog movement at large, the coalescing of underground momentum into a mainstream (or at least mainstream-adjacent) force.

Even from the beginning, Marillion felt like a prog cliché, which makes them the perfect band to put neo-prog into drive, and the band is honestly kind of charming for that. The group was formed in 1978 by drummer Mick Pointer (who would be fired from the band shortly after the release of Script) and bassist Doug Irvine (who was dismissed from the band before the recording of Script—Marillion clearly wasn't a great band for job security in its early years) on the basis of, as I hope is the case of any self-respecting prog group, the members' common bond over the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. In fact, the band's original name was just "Silmarillion," a straightforward advertisement of nerdom bona-fides that would put even Dün to shame.

With the addition of keyboardist Brian Jelliman (who, naturally, also was replaced before Script, by Mark Kelly, the eventual long-term keyboardist for Marillion) and guitarist Steve Rothery (who—surprise!—not only made it to the recording/touring of Script but is actually still with the band as its longest continuous member), they just kind of puttered around southern England's concert scene as a fairly anonymous but evidently hard-working pub band. My impression is that things were going okay but not spectacularly for Marillion as they worked their way up the local scene ladder, and were it not for one important development, it seemed likely that they would remain one of those townie-type bands that populate a parochial circuit without ever really transcending that setting[1]. That particular development happened in 1981, when Diz Minnitt and Derek William Dick joined the band. Minnitt isn't particularly important; he replaced Doug Irvine as bassist, but, typical of an early Marillion member, was soon replaced himself (by Pete Trewavas, who still plays bass for the band to this day). But he's worth mentioning for the sole reason that he came as a two-for with Derek William Dick. And that guy: in the context of Marillion history, Derek William Dick is huge.

Marillion fans might not recognize the name Derek William Dick, and that's because he went by "Fish" instead, apparently a nickname Dick, not at all fond of his admittedly poindexter-ish given name, embraced after it was given to him by a landlord who was upset at how much time Dick spent bathing[2]. Fish is basically the Peter Gabriel to Marillion's Genesis (if not quite the Robert Fripp to their King Crimson), and an incredible amount of the character of Marillion's first few albums can be attributed directly to Fish. In 1981, though, Fish was just a working-class dude with a deep interest in poetry who had just begun performing as a singer the previous year, and after he and his friend Diz Minnitt were dead broke after having unsuccessfully tried to form a group together, the two came across an advertisement for a band looking for a vocalist/bassist. That band was Marillion, having just parted ways with Irvine, and Minnitt apparently convinced the existing members of the band not to find just a singing bassist but rather two new members: a bassist and a singer[3]. Fish wasn't just a singer-for-hire, though. Along with his reedy voice (the Peter Gabriel comparison was not just an idle parallel[4]), Fish brought with him his love for poetry and actual lyric-writing acumen in tow, which meant that Marillion was not only no longer a solely instrumental band but also a band with actual literary/thematic ambitions: i.e. Fish's. He's the final piece of the puzzle that leads us up to the recording and release of Script for a Jester's Tear. Not to diminish the considerable talents of the rest of Marillion, but from where I'm standing, Fish's contributions to the band really are what were ultimately most responsible for turning Marillion from a band that people listened to in the pub to a band that people wanted to listen to at home, a band that could get a record deal, a band that could sell a pretty sizeable chunk of records. For lack of a better word, the addition of Fish to Marillion gave the band personality.

And what exactly was that personality? Perhaps this is where I should start talking about the record itself. Fitting of neo-prog's ambitions of sounding like regular prog, Script for a Jester's Tear is basically a meat-and-potatoes prog album, with a few technical upgrades (some of these guitar tones don't sound like anything you'd hear outside the '80s). There are six lengthy tracks (the shortest clocks in at 5:07 and most of the others go upwards of 8-9 minutes) full of tempo shifts, winding instrumental passages, guitar and keyboard theatrics, and self-serious tones. The instrumentation will be familiar to prog fans: keyboards and guitars as the main melodic instruments (though a bit heavier on the guitar than a '70s prog album may have been—another concession to the '80s, I'd imagine), bass and drums making up the rhythm section, most of them given a chance to solo at one point or another. None of the tracks are officially divided into separate sections in the liner notes, but several of them are definitely multi-part compositions, with songs changing gears every few minutes: "The Web," for example, is cut in two, a palate-cleansing pair of consecutive solos (first keyboard and then guitar) dividing the ominous, wordy opening from the fist-pumping finale. The record doesn't have anything particularly epic or ambitious in terms of the format-pushing suites and 20+-minute arrangements (Marillion's signature LP-side-filling opus at this point, the 19-minute "Grendel," was left off for reasons I'll get to in a minute), but there are plenty of classic prog records without those compositional flexes, too, and Script is definitely in the spirit of prog even if it doesn't shoot for the genre's biggest flourishes.

The most nonstandard element of the record is Fish's lyrics. They are still overwrought in the grand prog tradition, with wonderfully purple turns of phrase like, "The rain auditions at my window, its sympathy echoes in my womb," from the beginning of "The Web," which is a heck of a mouthful to open a song with. However, for a band as consciously evocative of prog's past and despite the medieval allusions of the title, Script for a Jester's Tear is strikingly free of the fantasy/sci-fi tropes a lot of people associate with prog (and that someone might fairly expect from a band named after a Tolkien book). In fact, Fish goes in the opposite direction, often bending his florid songwriting toward distinctly modern concerns; "The Web" is about an isolated, self-destructive loner trapped in his "rubber plant"-furnished apartment, paralyzed by depression and malaise; "He Knows You Know" is a bleak portrait of drug addiction; "Forgotten Sons" is about homeless veterans struggling with the psychological fallout of their war experiences; the title track itself is just straightforwardly a breakup song. It's a bleak, melodramatic album, but it's also one in which the lyrics don't really feel abstracted from the material reality of the world around it. There's a remarkable lack of pretension about Fish's writing as compared with the kind of metaphysical gobbledygook that prog is famous for. As overcooked as some of the turns of phrase can sound, the simple griminess of lines like the part in "Forgotten Sons" that talks about how "your father drains another beer" or the yearning magazine fantasies of a working-class girl "living in her cellophane world in glitter town" on "Chelsea Monday" have a blunt down-to-earthness about them that feels grounded and stark. The interplay of bog-standard prog instrumentation with grim and gritty (if elaborate) realism is the fundamental personality of the Marillion that I'm familiar with[5], and this texture is Fish's biggest contribution to the group.

Well, that and his voice. So I guess we need to get to that. I've already hinted at this, but there's no point in further beating around the bush: Fish sounds like Peter Gabriel. Not exactly like Peter Gabriel, but enough that it makes you turn your head, and paired with the band's pretty by-the-numbers prog instrumentation, the result is a group that sounds an awful lot like Genesis. And they knew it, too. The whole reason why "Grendel," their 19-minute epic, was left off Script is that the band members were worried that it sounded too much like "Supper's Ready," Genesis's massive opus that fills up most of Side Two on their 1972 album Fotxtrot. I like "Grendel," but the band is right; it sounds a lot like "Supper's Ready," though I'm not so sure why they drew the line at "Grendel," since Script is pretty reminiscent of Gabriel-era Genesis anyway.

There's a delicate balance between tribute/revival and just plain pastiche that Marillion straddles in this album, and while I don't think they ever bend to Greta Van Fleet levels of mimicry, there's no doubt that this album, and neo-prog in general, lean heavily on the tribute aspect of things by design. After all, that's the whole project of neo-prog: to bring back classic prog. For Marillion, that meant bringing back classic Genesis[6].

I'll go ahead and just lay my cards on the table by admitting that I am not a huge fan of neo-progressive rock. People complain about Spotify Core, and I basically feel the same way about a bunch of neo-prog in the sense that it often sounds like a bunch of the most obvious hooks of '70s prog (literary references! Moog synths! long instrumental passages!) stitched together into a facsimile of progressive rock designed to scratch the prog itch but with little of the sense of adventure that defined the '70s heyday. Progressive rock is sometimes derided for its misleading title, with its focus on recreating classical musical motifs (or even whole classical compositions) being much more backwards-facing than "progressive" [7]. But for as much as that retrograde strain manifested itself in, like, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, prog's first decade could also be wildly unpredictable and pretty radical in terms of composition and concept. You flip on a prog record from 1972 or 1974, and while there are some tropes you could reasonably expect, there was no telling what exactly you would be in for: a cha cha breakdown? an improvised, lyric-less vocal track? I guess my point is that '70s prog is, in its own dorky way, pretty visionary. But neo-prog? Neo-prog is the first purely regressive movement in prog history, premised entirely on the idea of recreating a kind of music from ten years ago. You put on a neo-prog record (at least one from neo-prog's mainline, non-metal wing), and the ratio is flipped from their '70s prog antecedents: while there are some moments of surprise, you pretty much always know what you're getting each time. And what you get is a group of people trying very hard to sound like golden-era Yes or Genesis, only with David-Gilmour-inflected guitar work and more straightforward songwriting.I'm of course painting with an overly broad brush, but I stand by the preceding sentences as a general rule-of-thumb when approaching neo-prog.

Marillion is a fine band, and Fish brings some interesting thematic preoccupations to the table[9]. And Script for a Jester's Tear is a solid album that I enjoy when I put it on—there's no denying the melodic swing of the final section of "The Web," for example, and "Forgotten Sons" is a tremendous closing track and certified bop from beginning to end. But I also find it hard not to be distracted by just how self-consciously this album inserts itself within the prog legacy. Everything about the record seems carefully calibrated to be a throwback to the halcyon days of progressive rock: the music itself, of course, but also the LP sleeve[10] itself, whose back cover completes a panoramic look at the "jester's" apartment, on the floor of which there is a record player surrounded by some Marillion singles set next to a Pink Floyd album. It's not really subtle; these guys saw themselves as the progeny of '70s prog. They even were going to get Dave Hitchcock, producer of several classic prog records from Camel, Caravan, and even one from Genesis[11], to produce Script until he was in a serious car accident and the label, EMI, put in Nick Tauber instead, a new wave producer who is probably responsible for the few ways in which Script sounds like an album of the '80s.

I'm okay with people just really being into the old sounds and wanting to revive genres. But I can't help but feel that Marillion, and neo-prog as a whole, hemmed themselves in and made themselves a somewhat kitsch enterprise by being so ostentatious in their connections to old prog and so preservationist in their definition of what prog should sound like. In my opinion, the most interesting attempts at picking up where '70s prog left off are within '80s metal, and I regard Marillion (and neo-prog in general) to be something of an evoluationary dead-end, capable of some good moments (Script is one of them!) but also kind of trapped in amber. I may cover more neo-prog albums in future posts—it is, after all, arguably still kicking in the 21st century—but probably not many. After all, this series is called "Prog Progress." I'm interested in how this progressive rock grows.

Until 1984!

1] A good portion of the band was basically just drawing unemployment this whole time, apparently, so they clearly weren't making a ton of money.

2] The only reason I can imagine that the landlord was upset about this is that he must have pro-rated the water bill, and I applaud every effort of Fish's to not only remain squeaky clean but also stick it to a landlord.

3] He didn't convince them too well, apparently, given that the band gave him the boot after touring a little with him. Apparently Fish himself drew the short straw and had to deliver the news to Diz, which must have been a knife to the back, though in the liner notes to Script for a Jester's Tear, Fish doesn't seem too torn up about it ("The unit had to come first," he writes, which... I mean, I guess nobody was in Marillion to make friends—or keep them).

4] Fish says that Marillion basically sounded like Camel when he first heard them, actually.

5] Which basically consists solely of the Fish era, which would last though the band's fourth album in 1987, after which Fish would leave, citing the physical and mental toll of touring.

6] Genesis themselves, of course, were by this time firmly entrenched in the pop world. I'm curious what they thought about Script.

7] And to be fair, prog rock feels downright conventional compared to jazz fusion and kosmische musik, the other two major "progressive" wings of experimental, rock-adjacent music in the '70s [8]

8] This is, of course, assuming that progressive rock is meaningfully separate from fusion or kosmische musik, an assumption about which I've already expressed some skepticism.

9] Though it's worth pointing out that the class satire of "Garden Party" feels very much the kind of thing that the Genesis of Selling England by the Pound would have written.

10] Or for me, CD case.

11] None other than Foxtrot, home of "Supper's Ready," which you might know by way of Marillion's song "Grendel."

Mini Reviews for October 19 - 25, 2020

Spooky season's almost over, which makes me sad. But I saw some good movies this week, which makes me happy.

Movies

Creep 2 (2017)
A very clever riff on the first film, which I thought was good but also kind of forgettable (I myself had to skim Wikipedia to remind myself of some of the details before watching this). This is much better and also not forgettable. Creep 2 is both a retread and a subversion of its predecessor, playing out a lot of the same beats but contextualizing them in a way that makes them land with a completely different effect. Duplass really comes into his own here, too, with a much fuller embodiment of the central character than in the first film, and Desiree Akhavan is a great foil. BIG laugh that Netflix lists these two movies together as "The Creep Collection," though, like it's a set of fine china or something. Grade: B+

 

Lake Mungo (2008)
Holy cow. I'm not sure why this isn't mentioned more often in the same breath as David Lynch's 21st century output or The Blair Witch Project, but alongside those works, this Möbius strip of a movie feels like one of the definitive statements of the haunting, reflexive unreliability of humanity's quest to document itself in at the overlap of digital and analog spaces. It's also bone-chilling, and also heartbreaking. This is almost certainly going to be my favorite new watch of my October horror viewings. Grade: A

 

 

Bloody Mama (1970)
A kind of admirable attempt at a gangster picture totally de-glamorized from any residual Bonnie and Clyde mythic counter-culture associations. These are some wicked, wicked people trapped in a go-nowhere cycle of violence. But I say it's only "kind of" admirable, because to be completely admirable, it'd have to have been anything but a amateurish collection of disjointed scenes just piling up one after the other without any sense of pacing or character until the shootout. This was sooooooooooo boring. Grade: C-

 

 

Kill, Baby... Kill! (1966)
A fun little Gothic horror movie heavy on the cobwebs and spooky atmosphere and light on the sensible plot or interesting, which is fine by me. Plot should always be subservient to mood in these kinds of stories, and this one delivers that, though I do wish that it would stop explaining its creaky plot so insistently so long as it's going to take as lackadaisical an approach to tying everything together as it is. Just let me vibe, you know? When the movie gets out of its own way, there are some delightful proto-giallo touches, like the way that the creepy estate is bathed in green-tinted light for no apparent reason except that it looked cool—and speaking of the lighting, Wikipedia says that the lighting was an influence on the look of Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, so if that's true, I suppose we have this movie to thank for that exquisite aesthetic. So thanks, Kill, Baby... Kill! Grade: B

Werewolf of London (1935)
I like some of the individual moments here, like the first transformation scene. But on the whole, there's really not a ton to recommend about the first big Hollywood feature about a werewolf, given the tedious stretches between the good moments, and oddly focused on botany to boot. I almost wish the movie were given over entirely to the batty secondary characters that populate the margins of this movie; I would definitely spend more time with the kooky landlady. Grade: C

 

 

 

Music

Sufjan Stevens - The Ascension (2020)
Sufjan Stevens has never been an apolitical artist, nor has he even been an exclusively optimistic one, but with The Ascension, he's really going full-bore into the kind of disillusioned, terrified fervor that right now animates everyone left-of-center in the United States political spectrum. The Ascension is, with little contest, Sufjan's most embittered, confrontational record, and Sufjan knows it; even if he hadn't declared the album "bossy and bitchy" in The Atlantic, there's no mistaking an album that closes with a 12-minute song called "America" as anything other than that. The feeling of betrayal is inescapable when at the chorus of that song, Sufjan sings, "Don't do to me what you did to America," and it makes sense; early records like Michigan, Illinois, and (to a slightly more opaque degree) Seven Swans show a Sufjan Stevens preoccupied with a sense of Americana that, while not always innocent, has a kind of romanticism to it: the Midwest suffused with a divine light, an imago dei. But now, over a decade removed from those albums, Sufjan finds those ideals sick and corrupted, perhaps even revealed as total sham."I have lost my patience / Make me an offer I cannot refuse," Sufjan sings on the opening track, a kind of last-ditch ultimatum before launching into this profoundly weary, emotionally grueling album. "There is no time for innocence," the song goes on, as if reflecting on and rebutting the wide-eyed wonder of the "States" albums and the state of our country in general (and I can definitely relate). The obvious companion record to The Ascension in Sufjan's discography is The Age of Adz, another anxious double LP positioned as a repudiation of Sufjan's past work by way of heavily electronic production. But unlike Adz and its glitchy, noisy beats, The Ascension is much more musically straightforward, opting for smoother and more immediate beats and more melodically accessible song craft. I know people who have found this change of pace from Adz's production to be refreshing, and I'm happy for them, but for me, the more pop-oriented sounds of this album are a big part of why I don't think The Ascension is nearly as good as The Age of Adz—not because I have anything against pop music, but on specifically this album, I just don't think Sufjan finds a good way to sustain this sound over the course of 80 minutes. Adz is a long album, but the relentlessly busy, often thorny nature of the instrumentation is a lot better at finding interesting permutations over the course of the record's lengthy run than the beats on The Ascension (a longer album than Adz, but only barely), which get a little thin and redundant over the procession of mid-tempo club-music downers. The stretch of the album from "Landslide" to "Sugar" is pretty weak, honestly, not because the individual songs are bad (though I really don't care too much for "Sugar," the most obvious and uninteresting song Sufjan has made in quite a while) but the sequencing of them one after the other after the other makes their individual moments kind of collapse into each other as a monochromatic sludge of samey music. I'm not at all sure why some of these songs made the cut when a song as good as "My Rajneesh," the B-side to the single "America" that Sufjan dropped a couple months before the full album itself, was left out. I'd happily replace "Sugar" and one or two other songs on here to make room for "My Rajneesh," not only because it would give the record some sonic diversity in its third quarter but also because it would have some fruitful interplay with The Ascension's deconstruction of Americana and Sufjan's older releases—the focus on a personally transcendent but ultimately hallucinatory and even dangerous cult in the Pacific Northwest is an intriguing mirror to Sufjan's sentiments on the album proper of having been mislead and lied to by our national ideology and also having participated himself in perpetrating the fiction of the American myth. Like "My Rajneesh," the best moments on The Ascension render broader sociological observations through personal and spiritual anguish. Sacramental imagery abounds, marriage and Eucharist and death twisted and maybe even blasphemed by the rituals of nationalism and personal pursuits: "I have broke your bread / For a splendor of machinery," Sufjan confesses on "America"—"I have worshipped, I have cried / I have put my hands / In the wounds on your side / I have tasted of your blood / I have choked on the waters." Elsewhere on the record, Sufjan is even more explicit: "Is all for nothing? Is it all part of a plan?" he asks, Job-like on "Ativan," and on "Tell Me You Love Me," it's simply, "I've lost my faith in everything." As with the best of Sufjan's work, it's never quite clear where he is talking to a lover and where he is talking to God and where he is talking to himself, and The Ascension adds the component of conflating a national identity with those things, too. It's often be sublime, especially when Sufjan takes all of this thematic complexity and turns it completely inward, as he does on the title track, hands-down the best song on the record and one of the greatest songs of Sufjan's career. Here, the slick production fades to negative space that allows Stevens's voice to fill a void, confessing and prophecying like nowhere else in his career: "And now it frightens me / The dreams that I possess / To think I was acting like a believer / When I was just angry and depressed," he says, only to invert this despair a couple verses later to declare, "Now it strengthens me / To know the truth at last / That everything comes from consummation / And everything comes with consequence / And I did it all with exultation / While you did it all with hopelessness." Sufjan Stevens has written a lot of good lyrics over his decades as a songwriter, but I don't know if he's ever written something as piercingly true about a specific moment in history as he does in that song. At its worst, The Ascension merely dilutes that insight, but at its best, the record becomes luminous. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for October 12 - 18, 2020

Hey, it's some spooky-feeling weather to match my spooky-oriented movie viewing!

Movies

Drag Me to Hell (2009)
A spectacularly outsized horror comedy with some serious fangs. In an attempt to prove she "has what it takes" to fulfill her ambitions to be promoted to the assistant manager of a regional bank branch, a woman decides to deny an extension on a frail old woman's mortgage, and then after the subsequent foreclosure kills the woman, our protagonist spends the rest of the movie being punished for her cruelty. True to form, Sam Raimi has a devious sense of slapstick (there's a literal falling anvil gag), and as a kind of counterpart to Evil Dead 2's obsession with the manipulation of Bruce Campbell's body, there's an obsession with bodily excrement here (often vomit) that's very physical but also kind of surreal—e.g. a nosebleed turns into a fire-hose of blood spurting from a nostril, or a burp released a fly from a mouth. But unlike Evil Dead, this body horror is less about existentially imprisoning the protagonist in her physical body than it is demonstrating the societal rot that her actions represent. Over and over again, excrement is flung at our protagonist until it's clear that it's just an extension of herself: she tries to re-frame her actions as a just response to torment, but by the movie's end (and particularly with the fake-out fairy tale ending), it's clear that she herself is the tormentor. The movie is complex in that it does a lot of work to show the systemic factors that put the protagonist in the position she's in: for example, the way that she, a low-ranking female employee, has to fight for a scrap of a promotion with a dude-bro new hire who is clearly less qualified than her while the bank itself uses both of their labor to make million-dollar deals is an obvious demonstration of how big institutions use false scarcity and baked-in sexism to pit against each other people who might otherwise cooperate and collaborate for mutual benefit. But the movie also makes of point of showing how when our protagonist is presented with a choice to either resist or reinforce this institution's power structure, she chooses to reinforce it, so in the logic of horror movies, she must be punished (and eventually, per the title, taken to Hell) for that, regardless of whatever justification she could give for her actions. It's a clever subversion of a typical horror premise that gives the film a deep mean stream that's tolerable (and even then, I'm not sure how I feel about the handling of our protagonist's body image issues) only because of how much of it is animated by righteous anger. Raimi's contempt for financial institutions, though present in something like the scene in Spider-Man 2 where the bank denies Aunt May her loan, has never been so fully articulated or acrimonious as it is here, and as such, it's probably Raimi's most overtly political film and an early example of Great Recession cinema in general. A funny, fierce, and fascinating film. Grade: B+

I'll See You in My Dreams (2015)
A solid little movie about finding companionship and meaning in old age. I'm not to that part of life yet, so maybe this is just some phony thing, but from the outside looking in, this seems exceptionally sweet and gently observed. Every actor in this movie is basically doing great, low-key work, though there's a plot development later in the film that feels more like Sam Elliott got busy and just couldn't finish the shoot, rather than the intense emotional turn it's meant to be, so it's not like the movie is perfect. But it's got good bones. Also, it's always good to see Rhea Perlman in something. Grade: B

 

 

Session 9 (2001)
Session 9 boasts a really terrific "set," i.e. the actual decommissioned Danvers asylum in Massachusetts, which was apparently not modified at all for the filming here. Otherwise, this movie doesn't really have a lot of offer. I found its cluttered, elliptical approach to psychological horror to be pretty tedious, and none of the characters feel like actual human beings we're supposed to be invested in—not always a problem in horror movies but is a major deal-breaker in this movie, where an investment in at least a couple characters' psyches is kind of central to the movie's project. The juxtaposition of early digital film with the crumbling institution makes for some interesting camerawork and atmospheres, but over the course of 90+ minutes, I need something more than that. Grade: C+

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
An utterly unhinged movie, but also kind of boring at times, especially in the opening sequences, where the movie seems to pay the most lip-service to a Victorian-novel-esque pacing and setup (the film is based on a notoriously awful novel by Bram Stoker, which I have not read). But when this movie throws off the shackles of good taste and plot cohesion, it becomes truly something to behold, especially in the dream sequences, when phallic and religious imagery combine into some striking sacrilege. It's also hilarious at points, too—there's one point where they play a record of a snake charmer, and it attracts a bunch of snakes as well as the snake lady villain, and the whole movie basically works on that kind of Looney Tunes logic. I just wish the whole movie were as fun as some of its parts. Grade: B-

A Bucket of Blood (1959)
An incredibly tight, Twilight-Zone-esque story about a guy who kills people and passes their clay-covered corpses off as fine art. This maybe takes some cheap shots at beat culture, but I dunno, I thought it was hilarious. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for October 5 - 11, 2020

I don't know why I write these blurbs up here every week. Sometimes I actually just don't have anything to say.

Movies

Bad Education (2020)
I knew nothing about the true story on which this is based, and I recommend that approach if possible, because then the movie plays as a remarkably twisty thriller wherein each turn of the plot reveals new depths of just how badly the central characters have behaved in their participation in the central scandal. Within fifteen minutes of the movie's beginning, you're thinking, "Huh, as advertised, this education does seem somewhat bad," but then by the end, it's "hooooooly cow, please stop, this education can't possibly get any worse!" A really great little parable of how the road to hell is paved not quite with good intentions but with the ability to delude yourself into believing that you have good intentions. This is communicated most starkly with Hugh Jackman's performance—probably the best performance I've seen in a new movie this year and almost certainly the best performance the guy has had in his career (I'd have to rewatch The Prestige to get rid of that "almost"). If nothing else, come for the Jackman, folks. Grade: A-

The Lords of Salem (2012)
I'm still not 100% on Rob Zombie's wavelength, and this movie is no exception—I really wasn't grooving with it until about 30 minutes before the end, when it twists from a mostly generic horror movie slightly elevated by some Attitude into a really affecting, psychedelic rumination on addiction/relapse. The latter stages of this movie ring deeply true, from the sobriety that suddenly morphs into a downward spiral to the complete isolation of using. The last real shot of this film before the credits roll is heartbreaking. On a different note, it's a real experience to watch this the same week as Witchfinder General, two movies which have about the most polar opposite feelings toward witches that I can imagine. Grade: B

Fat City (1972)
A solid, claustrophobic boxing movie that's like the bummed out cousin of Rocky—all its underdog, working-class sympathies and more broken heroes on a last chance power drive than you can shake a Bruce Springsteen song at, only without any of the optimism that often comes with the territory, and certainly no "Gonna Fly Now." On a production level, it's fascinating to think of this as a John Huston feature. He's a director so steeped in the old Hollywood studio system, but here he's doing really admirable work embodying the grime and looseness of the New Hollywood film-school generation: an impressive pivot for a guy who was over 40 years into his career at that point. I should watch more of his later output. Grade: B

 

Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm) (1968)
Brutal in a way that I was not at all expecting. Vincent Price usually brings a sly (or sometimes overt) camp to his roles, and his playing the eponymous Matthew Hopkins in this movie is the only of his performances that I've seen completely stripped of those winks and theatrics—just pure, vile, craven sadism in this man here. It's not a movie that's scary in the traditionally spooky sense, but watching Price play this man literally hellbent on torturing men and (especially) women accused of witchcraft is very, very scary. Grade: B+

 

 

Titicut Follies (1967)
Frederick Wiseman's first feature documentary is a lot more explicitly constructed and didactic than I was expecting, which is probably just a product of his not having yet fully formed his fly-on-the-wall documentary style yet. But part of me would like to imagine that the subject matter of this film made it impossible for Wiseman to assume his usually withdrawn stance. Taking place in an asylum for "the criminally insane," Titicut Follies chronicles an incredible amount of suffering as the authoritarian vice of the institution turns the humanity of the patients into an abstraction to be manipulated. I can't help but feel that the movie would be improved by a modern Wiseman 3+ hour sprawl that would allow us more of a sense of the bureaucratic banalities giving rise to the tactile horrors seen here, but as the furiously angry, viscerally sad document that this was intended to be, it works well, too. Grade: A-

Television

King of the Hill, Season 4 (1999-2000)
Now that the show is basically at the peak of its powers in my watch-through, some of its tendencies are starting to wear a little thin as the show settles into a more familiar groove. For example, I definitely think Hank is a more interesting character when he's a principled man whose principles put him just slightly behind the times and just slightly less compassionate than he should be, but the show's default mode is definitely to side with Hank's principles, which definitely saps the show of some of its energy by veering a little too closely to making Hank a hero at times. And the show's attempts at showing grace to the Souphanousinphone parents are a lot thinner than I remembered them being and don't really mitigate the kinda-sorta racist depiction of them. Connie remains one of the best secondary characters on the show, though, and her relationship with Bobby (the best primary character on the show, bar none) is a consistent highlight, sweet and funny and unforcedly complex, and forms the backbone of what I think is the best episode this season ("Naked Ambition"). There's a lot of other good material here, too (seeing Dale rekindle his relationship with Nancy is great, for example), so I'm not exactly complaining about this solid season of television. But it does feel like the strikingly complex, ambitious third season was walked a little back this time around for a slightly more straightforward, slightly less rewarding follow-up. I enjoyed myself, but nothing here surprised me. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for September 28 - October 4, 2020

It's spooky season! Horror movies forthcoming in the following weeks.

Movies

Return to Oz (1985)
This lives up to its reputation as a deeply weird, grotesque movie "for kids." I probably would have seen this sooner if its reputation had also been staked on its being an adaptation of the similarly deeply weird, grotesque Oz sequel novels by L. Frank Baum (which it gloriously is) rather than a sequel to the 1939 MGM musical (which it certainly is not). A lot of the freaky dream logic of this movie either comes directly from or is in the spirit of Baum's free-flowing, nonsensical world-building (we stick a deer head on a couch and turn it into a magical creature? Sure!), and the characters look almost exactly like John R. Neill's illustrations from the books, which makes this a very fun tribute to one of the more neglected corners of famous 20th century children's fantasy literature. There's a great sense of play to both the books and the filmmaking here; the movie's wild mix of stop-motion, green screen, and practical effects are a tribute to the idea that fantastical stories need fantastical cinematic style, and I'm very much here for that. Grade B+

I was on the Cinematary podcast talking about this movie and the original 1939 Wizard of Oz this week. You can listen to it here if you're interested.

Powaqqatsi (1988)
A relatively major sophomore slump for the Qatsi trilogy. Worse on basically every metric than its predecessor: less impressive cinematography, less well-observed imagery, wackier pacing—and while I appreciate the general thesis about the exploitation of Western colonialism, there's something about the Third World imagery that feels a lot more touristy and exoticized than I'm completely comfortable with, which is probably a little counterproductive for that central idea. Even our main man Philip Glass is putting in comparatively minor work in the score. That said, it's only "relatively" a sophomore slump, and I liked a good deal of what's here, even if it doesn't nearly measure up to Koyaanisqatsi. There are some very, very cool sequences here; in general, Powaqqatsi is a lot more interested in doing interesting things with edits and cross-fades/double-exposures, and a lot of the best parts here are when the movie makes these incredible, semi-surreal images by laying footage over other footage. Grade: B

Naqoyqatsi (2002)
This one's use of stock footage and obvious digital effects makes it kind of a change of pace for the Qatsi trilogy, and I understand why people don't like it. But I thought this was really interesting. Some of the ideas are a little eye-rolling (starting your film about technology with a long zoom into a painting of the Tower of Babel? Really?), but on a formal level, this movie presents some fascinating tensions about genre—like, I feel like it's a reasonable question to ask if a movie with like 80% of its footage being digitally constructed even counts as a documentary anymore (which is ostensibly what the first two Qatsi movies were), and on the other side of that coin, I also think in 2002 it's a prescient position to basically argue that there's no other way to depict a life increasingly mediated through constructed digital environments than via constructed digital footage. And on top of that, there's also just some really dope images here. I may have felt differently about how this movie looks ten years ago, but in 2020, when a lot of the current meme internet has only just begun mining the aesthetic possibilities of the uncanniness of turn-of-the-millennium digital imagery, this movie's effects actually kind of come full circle and look cutting-edge to me. I dunno, I feel like consensus got this one wrong; definitely not the worst of the trilogy. Grade: B+

Sin City (2005)
Within 5 minutes of the film's opening, I was laughing at just how dumb this thing was: the leaden dialogue that could have come from one of the movies my friends and I made in middle school, the "I'm a real man because I talk like I have a throat cold" acting, the way the movie apes everything about film noir except what made film noir interesting and profound. By the end, I wasn't laughing anymore, because the movie is such a bludgeon of dumb, masculine (and often chauvinist) posturing that two hours of it kind of just made me feel like my brain was going to roll out of my ear. Also, the whole reason I watched this (besides the old "it's expiring from Netflix" trap) is that I'm kind of interested in that period of like 4-5 years after the Star Wars prequels when there were all these wild experiments with color correction and green screens in Hollywood studio filmmaking (e.g. Speed Racer, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and I remembered this movie being a big moment in that mini-movement. But Sin City didn't even live up to that. I know a lot of people think this movie looks cool, and it does at times, but it's always in this extremely obvious, middle-of-the-road conception of cool that I just don't find that interesting. There's none of the uncanniness or weird beauty that some of those other mid-2000s CGI/greenscreen-extravaganza films achieve. Maybe this just has too much fidelity to Frank Miller's source material (which I haven't read), but Sin City feels more like pastiche or mid-tier fanart than a truly interesting use of that early-digital canvas. Grade: D+

Books

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen (1817)
I went into this hoping to champion an unduly maligned classic, but sometimes, the consensus has it right. It pains me to announce what readers have known now for 203 years, which is that Northanger Abbey is no good. Austen seemed to be going for an Emma-esque story here in which an ingénue has to learn to recognize the realities of the social dynamics around her, but instead of the protagonist being blinded by privilege, she's grown an askew version of the world because she has bought too thoroughly into the Gothic novels she loves to read. It's not a bad premise, and it could be interesting to see an early torchbearer of the novel wrestle with the psychological implications of novelistic storytelling (even while she devotes a few passages of this book writing an uncharacteristic Austen-talking-directly-to-the-reader polemic about the snobbishness of those who decry novels writ large). But it's clear that Austen didn't really know how to make the whole novel embody this idea in the same way that Emma's story does, and only a few passages (most notably, the famous section where the heroine, Catherine, mistakenly believes she has uncovered a murder in a Gothic mansion) actually realize the quasi-satiric ambitions of the book. The rest is filled with placeholder plotting that feels like Austen on autopilot, spinning generic romantic intrigue and social politicking in a way that definitely feels Austenian but sapped of a lot of the wit and spark that usually characterize her work. And speaking of wit, a chief pleasure of most Austen books for me is just the sentence-by-sentence pleasure of Austen's delightfully funny, often slyly caustic writing—she's one of the most stylistically tight prose writers in the history of English literature, and even when I lose interest in the plotting, I can usually find a lot to enjoy in the writing itself. But that just isn't present here. Northanger Abbey is rarely funny, and it's the only novel of hers that I've read that shows Austen losing control over tone and generally having a kind of loose, inconsistent grasp on her prose. I would like to think that the book's posthumous publication meant that Austen didn't have a chance to work over the novel and tighten everything up in revisions. But apparently she finished it a couple decades before her death and even revised it a bit before she died, so... I dunno, nobody's perfect. Grade: C