Mini Reviews for July 18 - 31, 2022

Announcement! My wife and I started a podcast! The basic idea is that we're reading through each book that's won a Newbery Medal and then discussing each one. I know I don't review a ton of books on this blog, especially children's books, but if that sounds at all interesting to you, here's the link!

Movies

Nope (2022)
I've seen people complain that this movie has a messy structure and an overcooked screenplay, and while I guess I theoretically understand why they'd say that (it definitely feels like we're seeing either too much or too little of Steven Yeun's character, and this movie is biting off a lot thematically with all of its "society of the spectacle" + limits of anthropomorphism stuff), I was captivated the whole time here. I'm an easy target for UFO thrillers, but even so, the specific ways in which Jordan Peele approaches that topic makes it feel like he was interested in all the same weirdo Americana stuff that I was growing up, and combine that with his Shyamalan-esque "just go for it, dude" conceptual unself-consciousness and his formidable formal command, and you've got a movie that's pretty specifically calibrated to my precise wavelength. I just thought this was a crackjack time at the movies. Also, re: the dense web of metaphors and thematic threads that a lot of people have found overdetermined and overbearing—I guess I have incurable English-teacher brain, but I thought that was fun! Grade: A-

The Bad Guys (2022)
Of all the major studios, DreamWorks is still doing the most interesting things with CG animation. It's a fairly paint-by-numbers heist film with a villain "reveal" that's even got to be obvious to the kids who make up the film's target audience, but at this point, I ain't watching DreamWorks animated movies for the plot: this has an intensely cool style that basically mixes 3D animation with some intentionally flat texturing and broad color work that make it look like computer-assisted cel animation of the kind you might have seen in the late '90s, or maybe even a digitally-inked comic book set in motion. Slick, but in a way that leaves room for play and invention. With any luck, one of these days, DreamWorks is going to get their hands on a front-to-back legitimately great screenplay and make the greatest mainstream animated feature of the decade. Until then, at least they're pushing the medium forward aesthetically. Grade: B

Because of Winn-Dixie (2005)
Softballs everything you would expect a mid-2000s family film set in the small-town South to (e.g. entirely benign Baptists, zero racial tensions), but its sense of place is really terrific—the movie nails the feel of that specific small-town window of the post-industrial, post-NAFTA but pre-"everything is just a fast food franchise or gas station" milieu: crumbling, half-vacant main street full of old-timers desperately clinging onto what remains of the idiosyncratic life their town once had. Some real grit at the margins of each shot. It's also surprisingly melancholy for a movie about a dog curing everyone's malaise. Credit to two strong central performances from Jeff Daniels and AnnaSophia Robb; the movie's deep undercurrent of sadness is simple but never calculated in their hands, which almost never happens with "single-dad reconnects with daughter" movies like this. Similar to its rendering of the setting, the movie's characterization of their relationship (and their shared but at times incompatible grief over the wife/mother who left them) is not particularly difficult, but it's so purely and effectively felt that it doesn't matter if the brush is broad. It's easy to say this a lot because major studios really only make like two or three types of movies nowadays, but they really don't make movies like this anymore, which is normally not something I would mourn (who misses the sappy family film?) but this movie's a great example of what we've lost by removing the possibility of the once-in-a-blue-moon successful product of this little genre. Grade: B

Cartoon Noir (1999)
More of an anthology of previously released animated shorts than it is a fully original movie on its own, and Only one of the shorts in the anthology has anything even resembling film noir ("Tale About the Cat and the Moon"). So anyway, here's a ranking of the shorts, sorted by favorite to least-favorite. "Abductees" is far and away the best here, a real masterpiece and also one of the best pieces of UFO media I've ever seen, but all the films are great. Feature-length adult animation has always had a spotty track record, so shorts are where it's at. There should be more compilations like this: NOW That's What I Call Music!, only for experimental adult animation.
    1. "Abductees" (1995, dir. Paul Vester)
    2. "A Gentle Spirit" ("Lagodna") (1987, dir. Piotr Dumała)
    3. "Joy Street" (1995, dir. Suzan Pitt)
    4. "Ape" (1992, dir. Julie Zammarchi)
    5. "Tale About the Cat and the Moon" ("Estória do Gato e da Lua") (1997, dir. Pedro Serrazina)
    6. "Club of the Laid Off" ("Klub odložených") (1989, dir. Jiří Barta)
Grade: B+

The Hole (洞) (1998)
For as much as this depicts misery and squalor (a crumbling city, endless rain, isolation in a pandemic [yike]), I found this to be deeply beautiful and human and even sweet. I have no idea how this would have played for me before having gone through several years of a pandemic characterizes by intermittent houseboundness and relative isolation (I at least have family at home), but the alienation these two characters feel from the broader world as well as the desperation with which they eventually cling to each other—right up to that transcendent ending in which the distance between the two is recklessly, compassionately pulled away—had me tearing up. I also watched it with my three-year-old, and that kind of drove home how lucky anyone is to have another person in their life who cares about that. I have no idea what he thought about it, he did watch quietly all the way through to the end (it was better than the alternative, I guess, i.e. taking a nap). His lone comment: "That's a lot of rain." Grade: A

Fatal Attraction (1987)
Flagrantly misogynist, which kind of comes with the territory, and for as much fun as Glenn Close has, it sometimes feels like she's hemmed in a bit. Some parts are weirdly slow, too, as if the movie can't make up its mind how artful it wants to be. Still, there's some good, nasty fun to be had once this gets cooking (er... literally in the case of that poor bunny). I think my problem is that I want to find an erotic thriller that is as good as Gone Girl, and maybe there just isn't one. Grade: B-

 

 

 

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
Good fun for the most part, and not nearly as smutty as I'd been led to believe. The opening and closing are great, but it does get somewhat draggy in the middle. Except for the beautiful women, it kinda feels like John Waters took everything I love about this movie—the dialogue, the arch line deliveries, the post-morality ethos, the sheer camp of it all—and nuclear-charged them, making much more front-to-back engaging (not to mention truly smutty) movies in the process, but you've got to respect an original, and compared to Waters's films, this movie is shockingly competent in the technical department. It's also glaringly obvious how much Quentin Tarantino loves this movie, too, though he kinda takes the opposite tact of Waters, making slicker and less weird versions of this movie. Grade: B

 

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) (1964)
As is to be expected with Mikhail Kalatozov directing, this movie is visually stunning, with a camera that's practically taken flight, swooping and panning madly in a seeming attempt to take in every possible bit of scenery and human life in each scene. It's incredible. It's also great at being an anthology film, with only the last segment falling flat (the one with the guy who initially declines to join the revolution, which only really fails because of its leaden didacticism, since the film style is still as vibrant as ever). It's also nice that this movie is actually hopeful; the other two Kalatozov features I've seen, The Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent, are both major bummers, which parallels the anachronistic creep of pessimism that hangs over every Soviet film because I know that that state will eventually fail. Cuba, on the other hand, for all its problems, remains a relative beacon for leftists worldwide as a socialist project that hasn't collapsed on itself or been undone by counterrevolutions (though not for lack of trying, of course), so it feels poetic to me that a film full of such national optimism in the radical then-present remains uplifting to a certain extent to this day. This is probably not exactly the right word for a movie that is pointedly agitprop, but it's almost sweet how much this loves the concept of a revolutionary Cuba. Grade: A-

Accattone (1961)
This mostly just seemed bleak. I was intrigued by the dream(?) sequence at the end, but overall, I'm not 100% sure what I'm supposed to get out of this, which is weird because the subsequent Pier Paolo Pasolini movies have, whatever their faults, crystal-clear intentions. Part of this must, as always, be chalked up to the fact that I simply don't know as much about mid-century Italian history as I need to to get the most out of the Neo-Realist films I've watched. But also, probably the biggest reason I don't know what to do with this movie is that the version I watched had absolutely terrible white subtitles that were illegible 30-40% of the time (they were hard-coded into the film, too). I really owe it to this movie to rewatch on a better transfer. Grade: C

 

Television

Russian Doll, Season 2 (2022)
Russian Doll, a kind of perfect little one-off jewel, didn't really need a second season, something I'm still confident of even after having watched this crazy-ambitious, wonderfully weird second season. But since we got one, at least it's good. After the first season, there really wasn't a ton left to do with the "Groundhog Day, but with NYC-based mystical stuff," so it makes sense that we'd get a different time problem here: this time, Natasha Lyonn's Nadia discovers that a train that takes her back to 1982, where she inhabits the body of her mother. At least, that's initially what the concept is. What it eventually becomes is an epic that spans generations and continents, leaning even more into the mystical stuff from the first season in order to spin a yarn about fate and the fundamental traumas at the root of family mythologies. It's considerably messier than Season One, and it's clear that the show doesn't have a clue what to do with Charlie Barnett's character here, who gets some tantalizing but underexplored threads that don't end up earning where his story eventually goes. But even so, the show can still be very funny and unexpectedly moving, and Lyonn's performance, which masterfully dances around but never lands on shtick, is still riveting. Honestly, I'm cool just hanging with Nadia while weird stuff happens. It seems that as long as this show lasts (Lyonn has indicated in some interviews that there will be a third season), we're at least always going to get that. Grade: B+

 

Books

Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski (1945)
At times really well-observed literary realism, at other times tediously moralized. I read this for the podcast, so keep an eye out for the episode if you're interested in more fleshed-out thoughts. Grade: B-

Mini Reviews for July 11 - 17, 2022

I'm out of town next week, so I'm not sure if I'll be posting here. But we'll see.

Movies

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022)
A really lovely little film about a woman trying to overcome sexual shame and internalized misogyny late in life. It's generous and spacious in terms of how its screenplay allows its four scenes to play out over 20-30 minutes apiece and how it lets Emma Thompson's character meander through conversations that eventually poke at some deep wells of pain. Thompson's obviously got a killer résumé, but this honestly might be one of my favorite roles of hers; she so winsome and funny while also subtly wielding the barbs of a patriarchal, anti-sex society that she is trying to slough off but also reflexively prodding at herself and others. She's great. It's not a perfect movie—the attempts to flesh out "Leo Grande" into a character rather than simply a device feel a little thin, and the visual style of the filmmaking is fairly flat. But I was surprised by how moving I found the movie by the end. Grade: B+

Fire Island (2022)
A reasonably fun update of Pride and Prejudice into a gay milieu that I know literally nothing about (Duckduckgo tells me that "Fire Island" is a real place, but I couldn't have even told you that until a minute ago), so I'm probably not really the right person to be writing about this. With that caveat, I do like that it's class-conscious in exactly the right way for a Jane Austen adaptation, which isn't a given in these sorts of things: here we have people who are all fundamentally materially comfortable but in meaningfully different strata of comfort and antagonism toward each other's relative power within that comfort, and the queer gloss fits surprisingly well over Austen's heterosexual gender binaries. I couldn't ever get over how annoying the voiceover is, though, and the guy playing the Mr. Darcy character is a huge swing-and-a-miss within a cast who is otherwise pretty solid, unfortunately. Grade: B-

Steven Universe: The Movie (2019)
I'm a little confused why this exists—it adds basically nothing to the story that was pretty satisfyingly capped off at the end of the last season, and it also doesn't really evoke the comfortable rhythms of the show, since there's almost no interaction with the townsfolk and the gems are all reset to factory setting soon after the film begins. But it's a pleasant, gentle-hearted hour and a half (hard to imagine a Steven Universe property not being) with some great character animation (esp. the villain), and as a musical, it's actually pretty great. The show always flirted with a musical format, but this is one of the few times it fully committed, and the only time it committed to a feature-length musical, and it's delightful as that. I can't remember where, but I saw someone lamenting that the Bob's Burgers movie didn't go full musical, and judging by how much the music elevates what's otherwise a kinda meh story, I am retroactively sad about that, too. Grade: B

Zabriskie Point (1970)
It's bookended by two great scenes: first, a live-wire meeting between white and black student activists and last, a slow-motion sequence of a bunch of signifiers of American capitalist consumerism being blown up, set to Pink Floyd's "Careful with that Axe, Eugene." In between, the movie's a kind of boring series of scenes of a boring white couple meandering around the desert, and while there's a theoretically interesting throughline between the black activists in the first scene accusing the white activists of being merely fair-weather activists with radical chic and the remainder of the movie in which these two more or less bear out that characterization by abandoning class/race struggle and embracing a bunch of empty hippie utopianism, it's just not that interesting to watch. That said, this movie's reputation as one of the worst of all time is ludicrous. I truly can't understand the embrace of something like Easy Rider and the rejection of something like this. Grade: C+

Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud) (1958)
A whole lot of fun and a lot more darkly comic than I was expecting. It feels like a proto-Coen-Brothers film more than anything else: a dude creates this meticulous plot to murder his boss and then things just slowly start spiraling out of control after he makes one stupid mistake that involves him getting stuck in an elevator. I don't think I was expecting the title of the movie to be quite so literal. The Miles Davis music is great, too. I'm curious if there's an earlier film noir with the whole "pensive jazz score over moody b&w cinematography" thing that's become a cliché for parodying the genre, or if this is the inception of that trope. Grade: A-

 

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
An absolutely devastating anti-war film that's seldom been matched in the near-century since in American film—maybe the only parallel is that other WWI-set masterpiece, Paths of Glory. Like Paths, All Quiet uses surgical precision to cut through the lie that allegiance to a nation-state has value; Paths is much more interested in the bureaucratic labyrinths that protect the privileged and the powerful from caring about the brutality that these systems inflict upon those on the front lines, whereas All Quiet basically is entirely from the perspective of that meager class who gets ground through the grist mill of the state's vanguard. That final double-exposure shot of the soldiers looking back over their shoulders as they are superimposed on a cemetery made me so sad. Patriotism: what a sham. Grade: A

Mini Reviews for July 4 - 10, 2022

In case you missed it, I published a post about Kate Bush's Hounds of Love as part of my series on progressive rock. You can read it here, if you're interested!

Movies

On the Rocks (2020)
Pleasant. Doesn't have the dreamy It factor of Sofia Coppola's best, but Bill Murray and Rashida Jones make a ridiculously charming father-daughter duo, and I enjoyed their low-key hijinks here a lot. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

The House of Mirth (2000)
Terence Davies does a great job of capturing the brutality of the Edith Wharton novel (my favorite of hers that I've read, for what it's worth), and Gillian Anderson specifically is 100% keyed into the very specific kind of detached, diorama-like spin Davies is putting on the material. Anderson is really, really terrific here, probably the technical best performance I've ever seen from her (I'm sorry, Scully!); the way that in the early goings she is able to let us understand the terrified insecurities of her character without letting slip one bit the mask of pretensions to high-brow society is masterful, multi-tiered acting—and when that mask does slip as she hits rock-bottom near the movie's end, it's some true fireworks. As for Davies, this isn't anywhere as ornate as his work in the '90s, but it's still beautiful, this time in a suffocating way that feels appropriate to the early-20th-century upper-crust-NYC setting. Overall just a very well-done costume drama. Grade: A-

The Color of Money (1986)
I was honestly a little bored whenever they weren't playing pool, and Tom Cruise is actively annoying here. But the pool sequences (especially those in the run-up to the finale, when Paul Newman's character is basically high on gambling—for a movie that goes out of its way to sneer at cocaine, this definitely has that "Marty remembers how good coke felt" feel) are electric. The very '80s atmosphere and Scorsese's occasional flashy new-wave touch make this feel ages removed from The Hustler, but about halfway through this, I realized that there are only 25 years separating this from The Hustler, while there are a full 36 years between Top Gun (which came out the same year as The Color of Money, by the way) and Top Gun: Maverick, which seems impossible to me because those movies feel way closer to one another than this and The Hustler. I don't know if that's just a testament to my screwed up perception of time and era proximity or if there's truly a much bigger shakeup in Hollywood ethos between the early '60s and the mid-'80s than between the mid-'80s and now. Grade: B-

Eat the Document (1972)
Just an hour of footage of Bob Dylan mumbling his way through his '66 tour, the clips strung together by what could generously be called experimental editing, intercut with concert footage of music that for the most part would be mercifully rescued and restored by the Bootleg Series Vol. 4. There are some really great kernels of scenes, almost none of which last long enough, but what's here is great (esp. the famous bit with John Lennon griping at Dylan for being too mopey). Warts and all, I found this kind of hypnotic and fun. Grade: B

 

 

 

Music

Arcade Fire - WE (2022)
This album was initially positioned as a return-to-form after the uneven Everything Now, ditching a lot of the disco/kitsch interests of that 2017 album for a sound more in-line with Neon Bible or The Suburbs. However, Arcade Fire ironically end up with basically the same two issues as they did with Everything Now on WE: occasionally embarrassing, obvious social commentary and an deeply uneven quality control throughout. Incredibly, the worst of these issues are clustered all on one track, the epic multi-part suite "End of the Empire," which plods along with boring observations about Society(TM) and the impending collapse of America until finally climaxing with the triumphant(?) declaration that "We unsubscribe, fuck season five." I say this as someone who is both deeply anxious about the collapse of America as well as generally an apologist for Arcade Fire's heart-on-sleeve brand of self-serious cringe: this is awful. Just truly, truly awful. At over nine minutes in length, "End of the Empire" takes up nearly a quarter of the whole album, and like the "Peter Pan" --> "Chemistry" --> "Infinite Content" --> "Infinite_Content" sequence on Everything Now, it forms a wretched centerpiece that nearly derails the whole record. I guess on the plus side, making it just one track means that you only have to press the skip button once this time? Anyway, the rest of the album is much better: occasionally great, even. "Age of Anxiety I" is an effectively nervy, groovy opener with a dancefloor pulse, "The Lightning I, II" is a terrific song in the classic Arcade Fire model, beginning with a folky mid-tempo melody that builds to a lose-your-mind ecstatic anthem of a climax, and "Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)" is Arcade Fire being corny is the right way. And that's more or less it; there's not a lot to the album, and if it weren't for the totemic black hole that is "End of the Empire," WE would be unremarkable, a solid but hardly earth-shattering release showcasing Arcade Fire returning to the safe territory of what they do best after a few records trying to push their sound forward. I'm hoping this doesn't signal the beginning of their "U2 in the 21st Century" phase, because they've not made nearly enough music to justify that sort of coda. Maybe I'm the problem, though, because I do really enjoy their back-to-basics tracks here. Grade: B

Prog Progress 1985: Kate Bush - Hounds of Love

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.

 

It's been a while, hasn't it? Looking back, I now realize that it's been over a year since I last published a "Prog Progress" entry (1984's Powerslave), which I believe is the longest gap between posts in this series. I'd like to think that it won't be that long again until I get to 1986, but realistically, it's not unlikely that it will take me that long. Turns out having kids is really time-consuming! Who knew! Regardless, I need to make at least one post per year if I at least want to keep pace with, you know, the march of time, so at the very least, I guess I'll see y'all again sometime around June 2023.

In the year-plus since that Iron Maiden post, a lot has happened, most of it largely depressing. However, most relevant to this post, one somewhat significant, not depressing occurrence is that Netflix released the first half of the fourth season of Stranger Things. I don't watch Stranger Things (watched the first season, decided it wasn't for me). I wouldn't normally be mentioning contemporary television series in a post about progressive rock in the '80s, but if you watch Stranger Things or just follow popular music discourse, you probably know where I'm going with this: one episode has a very prominent use of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)," the opening track and lead single from her 1985 album Hounds of Love. Since I'm not a Stranger Things viewer, I haven't seen the episode in question, but it's apparently an absolute banger of a moment when the "Running Up That Hill" needle drop hits, so much so that people have been streaming the hell out of this song, which has rocketed "Running Up That Hill" to #1 on the UK Singles Chart (her highest-charting UK single in 44 years) and #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States (her highest-charting US single ever). Kate Bush has never exactly been an unknown artist, but she's been pretty far outside of mainstream pop music attention for a decade or three in terms of what "the kids these days" are listening to, but now, thanks to this fairly preposterous series of events, Kate Bush generally and Hounds of Love specifically are having something of a popular renaissance.

This makes writing this post feel a little different than writing the other prog entries did. If you've been reading the whole series, you'll know that my tone in these is usually flavored with at least a little bemusement—much as I love progressive rock, it's not lost on me that a lot of it is deeply silly as well as being thoroughly out of fashion, and I like to have fun with that in the posts. But now, an artist who is no less weird than a lot of the prog rock I've already covered here has against all odds become a chart-topping presence again.

It's a wonderful little cosmic accident that I will savor for as long as it lasts, because Kate Bush is definitely weird stuff. In fact, one of the reasons that I'd planned for year to cover Kate Bush in this blog series is, back at her mid-'80s commercial peak, her status as a weirdo interloper among the pop music mainstream. I've talked at some length about how in the post-'70s fracturing of UK progressive rock, the tropes and ideas of progressive music starting finding homes in adjacent genres, most notably arena rock and pop, and Kate Bush is a direct beneficiary of this movement and probably even the torchbearer for the full potential in prog's diversifying from "rock" to "art pop." She's really something special, and that goes right back to her inception as an artist.

As a teenager in the '70s, Bush was something of a prodigy, having taught herself multiple instruments and written a substantial number of songs by the time she was 16. Somehow, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd got a hold of her demo tape that her family had been circulating to record labels, and he apparently liked it enough to finance and help produce another demo, which resulted in her getting signed to Pink Floyd's parent label, EMI[1]. EMI sat on her material for a couple years before allowing her to record and release her first album, The Kick Inside, in 1978. It's a pretty auspicious debut: the record peaked at #3 on the UK albums chart and did even better internationally, reaching #1 in Portugal and the Netherlands as well as #2 in Belgium, Finland, and New Zealand. More importantly, the album's debut single, "Wuthering Heights," went to #1 in the UK, Australia, Portugal, New Zealand, Ireland, and Italy. In terms of pure music-industry crassness, this album moved some units. I don't normally focus on the commercial aspects of the music in this series, but I am here just to emphasize two things: first, that Kate Bush truly was working in the realm of pop (at least in the broad sense of having popular, mainstream success), and second, she did this in spite of the waning influence of pure progressive rock. These two things together are notable because as it arrived (and would continue in her next few releases), Bush's music was distinctly proggy, especially in pedigree. David Gilmour helped produce the album, and a good portion of the Alan Parsons Project were session musicians on a number of the album's tracks. You've also got the typical mythic/literary flourishes often found in prog, no less obvious than in the smash-hit lead single "Wuthering Heights," a song sung from the perspective of Catherine's ghost from the titular Emily Brontë novel[2]. Then you've got the music itself, which has definitely proggy touches like a Hammond organ, a mandolin, synths, and the typical flourishes of unconventional instrumentation (a boobam on one track, literal beer bottles on another).

But at the same time, Kate Bush's music doesn't exactly feel like progressive rock—not in the sense of the genre as it existed in 1978, at least. There's not a lot on The Kick Inside or her subsequent records that sounds especially improvisatory, nor are there the lengthy solos or instrumental passages typical of '70s prog. On a more conceptual level, this isn't particularly band-oriented music; a lot of prog, especially that classic wave in the '70s, takes its cues from jazz in terms of the idea that a given song is about the interplay of people in the room, who trade off time in the spotlight with solos before rejoining the whole group[3]. Progressive rock in its purest form is remarkably collaborative. With Kate Bush, however, everything is clearly subordinate to one person's vision: her own. She wrote all of the songs on The Kick Inside (as well as on her future albums), and for all of the baroque, proggy touches in instrumentation, Bush's vocals and piano take the lead pretty definitively on each song, with the rest of the musicians filling out texture as they follow that lead.

This sort of monolithic realization of a single person's vision would become even clearer on her second album (Lionheart, which came out just a few months after The Kick Inside), when Bush began co-producing the music; by her fourth album (1982's The Dreaming), Bush was the sole producer on her work. By the fifth album (and this post's ostensible focus), The Hounds of Love, Bush had mostly cycled through the label-approved Alan Parsons Project musicians and had formed a stable of studio musicians of her own choosing. This sort of auteurist control over all levels of the production isn't unheard of in the broader realm of pop music (Prince comes to mind), but within the framework of prog, it's pretty singular; the closest analog I can think of is Robert Fripp's famously draconian leadership over King Crimson, but even then, the band's recordings are highly inflected with improvisation and a live interplay of musicians trading the lead that you simply do not see in Bush's work. Taken as it is, this foregrounding of a singular figure backed by studio magicians makes Bush's music a lot closer to the structure of pop, or at least the more pop-oriented rock acts of the era like David Bowie, with Bush being, in her own off-beat way, the star that the whole recording revolves around. This is why I think Bush is such an interesting figure to talk about in the context of prog rock: it is clearly prog on some level, but rearranged into the shape of pop and pop stardom.

Since it's already come up, I guess I'd better actually start talking about the main show, i.e. The Hounds of Love. In the context of this prog-pop duality of Bush's, The Hounds of Love is actually a pretty interesting case study, as it's structured so that the two sides of the LP each focus on bringing out one of those genres. Side one of the album (the first five tracks, if you're not listening on vinyl) is simply labeled "Hounds of Love" on the back cover and is a collection of propulsive songs seemingly designed to appeal to all the Kate Bush fans who fell in love with her as the kind of left-of-center pop artist who did "Wuthering Heights." It's probably the most conventional stretch of music in her entire career up to that point, and each of the songs is broad and approachable in the way you expect of pop music (albeit in that dreamy, cock-eyed way that a lot of UK musicians approached "pop" in the '80s). Here you'll find Bush's most well-known songs (outside of "Wuthering Heights"): the rollicking rock of "The Big Sky," the chamber-pop of "Cloudbursting," the synth-pop of the title track, and yes, the immortal "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)." That's not to say that any of these songs involve Kate Bush sanding off the bizarre edges that often make her music interesting (she barks like a dog on the title track, after all), but these songs are certainly foregrounding the side of Bush that knows how to write a track you just want to listen to again and again. They've all got huge hooks and sticky melodies, and taken as a whole, that first side is just irresistible, banger after banger after banger. A lot of the press surrounding the album's release had to do with painting the record as Bush reemerging as a major commercial player after a few albums in the wilderness, and that's absolutely to the credit of the "Hounds of Love" side.

And then you get Side Two, labeled "The Ninth Wave" on the album packaging, which pointedly not a bid to reemerge as a commercial player. "The Ninth Wave" is an ambitious, genre-bending, side-long suite threading together seven tracks to tell an impressionistic story of a woman's mythical journey through birth, life, and death inspired by the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In terms of the music itself, it's a radical break with the first half of the record on the level of what David Bowie and Brian Eno did on the Berlin trilogy or what Peter Gabriel was doing on his first few solo records; instead of the pristine, left-of-center pop songs of Side One, "The Ninth Wave" presents melodies that snake along in unpredictable directions among richly textured, open-ended soundscapes occasionally punctuated by string hits and other studio trickery (as well as, in one memorable instance, an Irish jig). An epigraph in the liner notes indicates that the suite was inspired by Tennyson's Idylls of the King, a cycle of poems about King Arthur and Camelot[4], and it seems that not just the lyrics (more on that in a minute) but also the music itself is rooted in a kernel of that Tennyson work: for as abstract and experimental as the record gets in this section (and it is, often flirting with ambient and electronic structures), "The Ninth Wave" is nonetheless organized around traditional and at times even pre-modern European folk music, not just in the musical structures but in the instrumentation as well, which includes a Slovakian shepherd's flute, bagpipes, an Irish drum, and other indigenous European instruments. The way "The Ninth Wave" weaves together '80s studio experimentation with music from the deep past stretches the album back from whatever avant-garde it occupies in its present to connect it to a profound well of myth and history in the same way that Tennyson was linking his Victorian moment with the national and moral tradition of Arthurian legend. Bush is, in a way, insisting on her role in the continuum of the national, continental, and artistic lineage that Tennyson (and any number of other poets and artists) claims. I hope it goes without saying, but this is prog as hell: the sense of myth, the assertion of ostensibly popular music into the realm of high culture, the fusion of traditional European idioms with modern rock/pop shapes, the couching of all of this with a side-long suite of continuous music. If Hounds of Love Side One was the distillation of Bush's commercial pop impulses, then Side Two is certainly the culmination of her pedigree within the world of progressive rock. As a piece, it's stunning.

And yet, at the same time, if you were to listen to a random minute of "The Ninth Wave," you probably wouldn't peg it as prog in the same way that you could of a lot of Yes or Gentle Giant or (to use an example recently[6] covered on this blog) Marillion. It's too outré, too ambient, too folksy. This is also true of Side One as well, though in the other direction: it's simply too pop. And yet, it's hard to describe Hounds of Love in a way that doesn't make it sound like prog, at least on paper. In the context of this blog series, the cool thing about Kate Bush is her ability (especially on Hounds of Love but really, throughout her career) to take the theoretical parameters of prog and make them sound like no prog you've ever heard before—a true embodiment of the "progressive" ethos of prog, not just progressing rock(ish) music but progressing the genre itself into new forms. I've talked about this on the last few entries in this series, so I don't want to beat a dead horse here, but one of the things that I find most interesting about what happens to prog in the '80s is that prog's mainline implosion at the end of the '70s kind of necessitated the blowing up of the expectations of what the classic prog acts established as the expectations for the genre, and what interests me least about prog in the '80s are the acts that try to keep those old expectations alive (i.e. neo-prog, i.e. Marillion and their cohort). Whether it's the flourishing of progressive metal or the cross-breeding of arena rock with proggy instrumental textures[7], the people carrying the torch forward for the genre in my mind were those least likely to be precious about its boundaries as a genre. Kate Bush, with her singular vision and top-to-bottom ownership of the production process, is a bigger part of that vanguard of post-prog artists than anyone else I've yet covered on this blog.

When talking about her ability to move prog into the future, it isn't lost on me that Bush is a woman. Within the world of pop, a female-fronted act isn't all that anomalous[8], but within prog (especially British prog), it's a rarity to the point of near non-existence[9]. For reasons I've never quite been able to figure out, progressive rock is heavily masculine-presenting, and it's hard not to speculate (though also hard to say for certain) that Kate Bush's foregrounding of pop melody and experimental eccentricity (both realms historically more gender-diverse, though prog's abysmal record is a low bar to clear) gives her a backdoor into progressive music that she might not have had otherwise. Whatever the case, Kate Bush seems especially conscious of gender and her place within a masculinized world on Hounds of Love. Side One's songs are full of gendered angst, none more so than "Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)," in which the titular deal with God involves Bush's speaker hypothetically flipping genders with her significant other so they can understand the pain they inflict upon each other (and, implicitly, the uphill climb women face in a masculine society).

But the part of the album where this idea comes into full fruition is "The Ninth Wave," which is, as previously mentioned, inspired by Tennyson's Arthurian cycle, but what I didn't point out before is that all the Camelot stuff is purely subtextual; the literal lyrical thread of Side Two involves the story of a woman who is adrift at sea and experiences some kind of vision that lays out her whole life in mythical terms as she battles what seem to be near-fatal conditions on the ocean. A lot of this is, like the music, somewhat abstract and hard to parse, but what comes through clearly is the importance of this narrator's identity as a woman, maybe even a kind of ur-woman who has a primordial connection with the feminine experience throughout human history. Significantly, during one sequence in the suite (the song "Waking the Witch"[10]), the woman's vision seems to link her struggles to stay afloat at sea with a witch trial where the accused woman was thrown into water (maybe as execution, maybe as a test of her witchiness). Witch trials are somewhat notorious for using specious evidence to prosecute women who were perceived as having transgressed or abandoned their ordained (usually subservient) role within society, and whatever else Kate Bush is communicating on this album (I'm not sure of everything), it is obsessed with this idea of transgressing and transcending the limitations placed on women by a patriarchal society. And it works on a metatextual level, too; Hounds of Love shows Bush claiming a stake in the Victorian gender morality of Tennyson's Idylls of the King and the by-then nostalgic boys club of progressive rock. She has, in a way, made good on the premise of "Running Up That Hill": she's run up the hill of success in a patriarchal world. But also, by making music that is so fully her own, both in terms of its production and also it's distinctly non-prog sound, she's also improved upon that premise. She's run up that hill, for sure, but she didn't need God to let her switch places with a man; she's done it as a woman.

I still don't exactly know why prog is so dude-heavy, but at times I wonder if it's a problem with how we've tended to define what prog is. If the sound of prog is based on a few influential records made by men[11] (a definition this blog is certainly guilty of perpetrating), it's possible that this just makes prog systemically inclined to drawing its own boundaries around music that primarily men tend to make. I don't want to be too gender-essentialist about this, and obviously women and nonbinary people are capable of making something that sounds like, I dunno, Close to the Edge. But it's also true that different life experiences and different contexts create different perspectives and subcultures and approaches to art, and how many nuances and innovations of prog's sound by people who aren't men have just been left by the wayside because it simply didn't fit the sometimes rigid format occasionally pressed onto the genre. Maybe there's a different definition of prog that skews toward fuller, richer, more gender-inclusive music made under the broad philosophical impulses of progressive rock. Is Joni Mitchell prog? Is Vashti Bunyan? Laurie Anderson? I dunno. But I'm declaring right now that Kate Bush is[12]. Maybe I can get the Stranger Things crowd onboard with me.

See you in 1986!

1] With the money from her signing bonus, Kate Bush paid for classes that allowed her to become trained in interpretive dance and miming, which gives you a pretty good idea of what a top-shelf weirdo she is. Just such pure, beautiful eccentricity.

2] Kate Bush and Emily Brontë share a birthday (July 30), it turns out.

3] There are a few exceptions (most notably Rick Wakeman), and of course everybody had their own solo records.

4] The quote included in the liner notes is this:
    "Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,
    Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep
    And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged
    Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame"[5]

5] The notes misattribute the quote to the poem "The Holy Grail," but it's actually from "The Coming of Arthur." Not that it really matters, but I can't in good conscience be an English teacher and not be a pedant about something like that.

6] Relatively

7] Speaking of Asia, Geoff Downes appears on one track of Bush's previous album, The Dreaming.

8] Though even here, Kate Bush is pushing forward with her hands-on approach to everything in her music: "Wuthering Heights" made Kate Bush the first female artist to have a #1 song in the UK that she wrote herself.

9] There's probably an argument that, with the gender-bending trends of '70s British rock, there's a stronger presence of gender-nonconforming or even nonbinary performers (or at least ones who present as-such onstage) than female performers, but I kinda don't know if I want to open that can of worms.

10] Which uses a sample from Pink Floyd's The Wall, by the way. It's far and away the most out-there track on the album, though not because of the sample (which is brief).

11] White, usually British, usually straight men at that, but again, I don't know if I have the bandwidth to open that can of worms on this post.

12] Arguably more so in her 21st-century output, where albums like 50 Words for Snow let her music fully spread out into much longer, more spacious compositions.

Mini Reviews for June 20 - July 3, 2022

Sorry for missing last week! Things got busy!

Movies

Spiderhead (2022)
Pretty dumb by the end, and specifically the action climax (set to Hall & Oates) is no good whatsoever. But before that, it's a mostly fun little sci-fi thriller in the vein of Ex Machina, i.e. "futuristic tests in an enclosed environment with a charismatic mad-scientist type." Chris Hemsworth (the mad scientist-type) is extremely entertaining, actually—of all the Marvel people who primarily exist as Marvel people (as opposed to, say, Scarlett Johansson, who has a robust career elsewhere), Hemsworth has always struck me as the most movie-star-ish, and performances like this make it clear how much of a shame it is that his career has not really made space for him to be characters who aren't Thor. Grade: B-

 

RRR (రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం) (2022)
I am not qualified in the slightest to comment on the politics of this movie, which are complicated, but hey, I had a good time with Top Gun: Maverick, whose politics are not complicated at all (they're bad!), so who am I to say anything? Anyway, as a piece of action movie craft, this completely rules. For a full 100 minutes, you get a non-stop, rip-roaring, fist-pumping onslaught of some of the most banana-pants wild action choreography I've ever seen, even within the already fairly banana-pants-wild world of Asian action cinema. Everything's just flying across the screen, usually in slow-motion, in these incredible comic-book-ish tableaux. The film slows down a little in the subsequent hour-plus, but only a little. I was a little disappointed how the Komaram Bheem character kind of fades into the background as we're given a somewhat awkwardly structured info-dump about Alluri Sitarama Raju's backstory, but only a little. For the most part, this just rocks and rolls like no other three-hour movie I've seen. Also, some British colonizers get killed in some really nasty ways, and whatever the politics of the rest of the film, I gotta give this movie props for that. Also also, as awesome as the action sequences are, the best scene of the movie is the amazing dance-off early in the film. The British not just being literally killed in battle but also figuratively killed on the dance floor. Fantastic. Grade: A-

The Long Day Closes (1992)
Terence Davies movies always have this floating, ethereal quality that makes them more dreamlike than narrative, but this is the first of his that I've seen that decouples narrative almost entirely and instead leans into the free-associative possibilities of Davies' style to depict a just-barely-prepubescent childhood in postwar Liverpool. This is, more than any film I can think of outside of Andrei Tarkovsky's Mirror, a film that understands how our human minds process the passage of time less as a story and more as a collection of images, sounds, and emotions that capture the atmosphere of given periods of our lives without necessarily tying those in to a rigorous timeline of "when" and "how." Just absolutely stunning filmmaking on display here, too, which is pretty much a given with any Davies film but especially so here, where it far eclipses that of any of his other movies I've seen. Kinda wild how most of the rest of his later films are so much more heavily narratively driven, given that it kinda feels like he unlocked his secret weapon with the dream style here. Grade: A

Rebels of the Neon God (青少年哪吒) (1992)
I wish I liked this more than I do. I mean, I do like it, but I was gearing up for another slow-cinema opus in the vein of Goodbye, Dragon Inn, and instead, it's just a low-key drama about some young adults having ennui and doing crimes, which is good but kind of a letdown. I should probably rewatch with my expectations appropriately recalibrated, but even so, I can't imagine preferring this to, for example, the movies where Wong Kar-wai does something similar. That said, the vibes are pretty immaculate for what this is. Grade: B

 

 

The Cosmic Eye (1986)
An animated movie that looks like the cover of Don Cherry's Organic Music Society put into motion, which is fitting because the music in this movie sounds a lot like the kind of music Don Cherry and the rest of that whole spiritual jazz wave in the 1970s were making. Which of course means that the music absolutely owns. The animation is also very, very cool, completely ambivalent to hiding the drawing streaks and strokes that a lot of more traditional animation tries to smooth away, and the result is something that is constantly shimmering with organic motion. The basic, hippie-ish "why can't we all get along?" text of the film (the whole movie basically consists of aliens looking down on earth and wondering why there is so much conflict and violence when human beings share so much in common) is pretty shallow in that new-age-y way that sometimes comes out of well-meaning social-justice sentiments without a lot of concrete basis in material specifics, but it's at least a broadly nice sentiment. I'm mostly just here for the very cool music and animation, though. Grade: B

The Last Detail (1973)
The kind of movie that spends its first 90-ish minutes building up this really sweet, warm male camaraderie just so it can show the system (imperialist, patriarchal, judicial—take your pick) crush it in its final 15 minutes. A real bummer of a movie, but my kind of bummer movie. Also, maybe my favorite Jack Nicholson performance? The real star here is Randy Quaid, though, who is adorable beyond measure. Grade: A-

 

 

 

Love in the Afternoon (L'amour l'après-midi) (1972)
I've had this on my watchlist for years entirely on the basis of its being referenced in a St. Vincent song ("Chloe in the Afternoon," i.e. its original title in America). So when I popped this in and the opening title card informs me it's the last in a series, I was like, "Uh oh." Luckily, it seems like the entries in Éric Rohmer's "Six Morality Tales" are fairly standalone, and if there was any of this that I was supposed to connect to previous entries, it went completely over my head as I blissfully enjoyed this pretty straightforward little fable about a man being tempted into infidelity. I know this already has an English remake (starring Chris Rock??), but tbh, Eyes Wide Shut already feels like it's picking up the baton and taking it to the finish line. Grade: B

 

The More the Merrier (1943)
A movie about a very relatable situation in which you have sublet your apartment to a guy who is trying to set you up with the guy he sublet his sublet to, just so he can destroy a political opponent. 100% a delight. Also, surprisingly steamy for a studio movie of its era. Grade: A