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
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
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-
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-
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
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
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