Mini-Reviews for July 4 - July 10, 2016

This week was bad on pretty much every national metric I can think of, and in the face of lost life and systematic racism and completely dysfunctional national discourse, pop culture doesn't even register on the list of things we should be caring about right now.

And yet.

I keep coming back to Spike Lee's two best films—Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X—and thinking about just how hopeless those two movies should feel and just how emphatically not they both (especially Malcolm X) are. Pop culture is fake: it can poke and prod and moan like ghosts; you can never really hold it in your hand. You finish an album, and you're just left with an empty room. You finish a movie, and you're left with popcorn crumbs and whatever fleeting neurological reaction the moving images have stirred up. But somehow, with those movies, Lee created something real, something that bounces around, alive in our world, shakes us the same as if we'd been hit by a fist or a bowling ball. On paper, they are crushing movies, ones that should destroy, but in the electric air, they fill emptiness. Movies are an illusion, but the very best of them can make ideas that aren't.

That's what we're looking for when we watch, listen, read, whatever: that rare straw-into-gold occurrence, when we've finished a book or a TV series and the dust clears and in front of us on the floor is something staring back at us. Not everything I ran into this week left that, but a few did. They didn't make the black deaths or the police deaths or anything any less awful; they didn't "fix" anything. But we can look at what they gave us and take some measure of comfort in the fact that their mere existence is proof that somewhere, there exists creation where there should be void, meaning where there should be static.

Movies

Finding Dory (2016)
It's Pixar, so you're guaranteed at least two things: jaw-dropping CGI and tears. There's no denying the sheer technical mastery of the images on display: this time, the sand in particular looks amazing, with what seems to be every individual grain animated. Whether or not you find the tears to be cashing in on the film's predecessor, the all-timer Finding Nemo, probably depends on how cynical you are on Pixar's sequel-making process. In this movie, Dory's looking for her parents, who never seemed much of a concern for her previously, and while that's narratively justified (she's basically forgotten them), it does have the whiff of Disney direct-to-DVD-ness. The good news is that the execution of that dubious idea is pretty much flawless: Ellen DeGeneres, whose voice acting continues to be the MVP in the now-franchised Finding movies, breathes into Dory as much pathos and humor as ever, and the host of newcomers—including Ed O'Neill's cranky octopus, Kaitlin Olson's nearsighted whale shark—all deliver on what was also the most enjoyable aspect of Finding Nemo, which is Pixar's ability to create hilarious character types from marine life. In the annals of Pixar sequels, Finding Dory's less emotionally involving than the Toy Story films, less thematically interesting than Monsters University, but significantly funnier than all of the above (not to mention Cars 2)—meaning that it's very good, and you should see it. Grade: A-

Lemonade (2016)
The music video has long flirted with experimental film, but with Lemonade, it's gone full-on art cinema. The results are stunning, teasing out themes from the album by manipulating the iconography of Beyonce-Jay-Z into an inventive, time-hopping, gorgeous hour of breathtaking narrative. The use of poetry in voiceover and the alternating color/b&w palettes alongside slow-motion imagery calls to mind none other than Andrei Tarkovsky (albeit a considerably more foot-tapping version of him). I love Tarkovsky. I love this video. Or movie. Or whatever we're calling it. Grade: A

The Sacrifice (Offret) (1986)
Speaking of Tarkovsky... It seems to be a common theme with me and the man's films where I spend the first 30-60 minutes slightly bored and wondering if this is going to go anywhere, only later to be smacked in the face with the realization that yes, this is going somewhere, and it's going there. The Sacrifice is no different, and man, once you exit that "what's the point" phase, it hits hard. The central "setpiece" (if we can call it that) involving a possible witch and desperate pleas to God and the freakiest sex scene I've ever seen is riveting, as is the provocative ending that hints at that all-time worst cop-out—it was all a dream!—with such utter strangeness and towering horror as to redeem even that hoary trope. The reputation of this film as weaker Tarkovsky isn't entirely off-base (I'd rank it with Solaris near the bottom), but that's only a consequence of just how immaculate the man's filmography is. Grade: A-

Swiss Army Man (2016)
I watch a lot of strange movies, but it wasn't until Swiss Army Man that I realized how few exuberantly strange movies I watch—usually, there's some degree of straight-facedness or horror to the weirdness in something like, say, The Lobster. But golly, Swiss Army Man just has the cinematic equivalent of a big, goofy grin on its face the entire damn time, and it's wonderful. The final fifteen minutes almost topple the whole thing, both in a good way that punctures indie movie romantic tropes and in a bad way that risks making the film's resolution just a bit too literal. But the very final moments return the movie to its delirious weirdness, and it's so much fun. Grade: A-

What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)
Its gentle absurdity (as McGuffins go, the world's best egg salad recipe is up there) is good for a few chuckles. A few. The lack of real belly laughs is good for kicking Allen's worst feature, Celebrity, while it's down: Celebrity's even worse than that fumbling, uneven debut! People talk about Woody Allen's "early, funny" ones, but well, I've also found his early, unfunny one (ones, if we're counting the generally terrible What's New Pussycat). Tiger Lily is never out-and-out bad; it's never actually good, either, and moments (the stripping over the disclaimer at the end, for example) trip over the same "hubba-hubba" masculine leering that infects a lot of Hollywood comedies from the era. Grade: C


Television

Better Off Ted, Season 1 (2009)
It's like scientists in a lab (perhaps a Veridian Dynamics lab?) managed to take Scrubs, isolate all the cheerful absurdity and goofy dialogue from the maudlin stuff, and give it a shot of light sci-fi, bestowing us with inspired silliness from a show that was cancelled all too soon. I suspect that if it had aired on NBC during the same period, it might have made it, but getting 2-3 million viewers on the much more profitable ABC was pretty much a death warrant in the last conceivable moment before streaming became a viable threat to the networks. Oh well. At least we got what we did (which includes also a second season which I will be moving on to promptly). Grade: B+


Books

The Children's Home by Charles Lambert (2016)
A dreamy story that at different moments gestures toward being both a fairy tale and a horror story, though never fully committing to either. Some parts move really well—everything we find out about the protagonist's family history is great. Other parts feel underdeveloped and vague, such as pretty much everything about the mysterious children who show up at the protagonist's home. It's alright. Grade: B






Music

U2 - Zooropa (1993)
U2's stranger, more adventurous followup to their career-best Achtung Baby lands about halfway between the misunderstood masterpiece that its biggest cheerleaders claim of it and the dead-end experiment that the band now largely dismisses it as. I'm not the biggest fan of the fuzzy "Numb" or the placeholding "The First Time," but other places, gambles that seem like straight-up disasters on paper pay out immensely: the falsetto-R&B jam "Lemon" is stirring in a sideways way that few U2 songs aspire to, and the entirely Johnny-Cash-sung "The Wanderer" ends up being arguably the best album closer in the band's discography. Grade: A-

Mini-Reviews for June 27 - July 3, 2016

Reviews! Woot woot! Boy, I gave a lot of B+s this week.

Movies

Zootopia (2016)
Zootopia has energy to spare. This is both a good and bad thing: good when it lends itself to the incredible biosphere designs and the dense, silly animal wordplay; bad when it makes the movie merely busy when it's trying to be clever. The result of the latter is that the characters are just a bit thinner than they perhaps should be, and the villain reveal doesn't quite make as much sense as it should. But for everything wrong with pacing or plotting, I can name three things the film does extraordinarily well, and taken as an average, the movie's quite successful indeed. And all of it in the service of an aggressively progressive take on privilege and oppression, one that's eyebrow-raising by the (admittedly low) standards of a mainstream American film and downright revolutionary by the standards of Disney animation. One plot point in particular suggests a particularly radical and even seditious take on the role higher-ups in the government have played perpetrating institutional oppression, and for a moment, it sends the movie sailing left of even Spike Lee territory, which is something I'm positive I never thought I'd say about a Disney feature. Grade: B+

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark taking place within the physics of a Chuck Jones Looney Tunes, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the specific kind of fun Tintin is. My only knowledge of the original comics is the intensity with which a middle-school acquaintance of mine wanted me to read them, but I can't imagine half of the kinetic wit could have come from the page. Spielberg's having a lot of fun here, and so am I. Grade: B+

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
It's a lot funnier than I'm used to this sort of movie being ("this sort" referring to "popular Hollywood comedies from my high school years"), and it manages that rare trick of having the free-flowing absurdity of a heavily improvised movie without actually feeling heavily improvised. The jokes do peter out toward the end; the film does this weird thing where for 2/3 of its run time it asks us to regard Ricky Bobby's career with ridicule, only to turn around and ask us to genuinely root for him in the final act, a turn that's not nearly successful enough to justify leaving behind the far funnier buffoonery of the early goings. But overall, it's still funny. I suppose that's what counts. Grade: B+

Attenberg (2010)
For a movie that begins with the most disgusting kissing tutorial I've ever seen, it's actually a sweet, almost tender coming-of-age-type film. It feints toward the kind of into-the-abyss perversity of other recent Greek films (Dogtooth director Yorgos Lanthimos makes a rather prominent cameo), but it's really more grounded in realism and recognizable human emotions than the other ones I've seen. Grade: B+

The Right Stuff (1983)
I hadn't seen this in at least ten years, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much it held up to my memories. For a 3+ hour movie, especially one that's relatively episodic and plotless, it's remarkably fleet, something I can only attribute to the sharp editing and delightful cast. I'm not entirely convinced that Chuck Yeager needs to be in the movie as much as he is (although I recognize the importance of his arc to the structure of the film itself), but overall, I thought it was quite good. One thing that's interesting is that you can see the transition away from the more formally engaged '70s style of filmmaking toward the '80s/'90s prestige drama formula. The editing and lyrical moments Kaufman indulges in are totally '70s, but the pacing, slightly cute characterization of historical figures, and alternately comic and serious tones are totally anticipating the '80s Oscar-bait playbook. It's not a bad thing; the movie works great. But you can see where this is going. Grade: B+

Like Father, Like Son (そして父になる) (2013)
Handsomely filmed and acted, but I couldn't get over just how outlandish the whole premise seemed to be. With the possibly deal-breaking caveats that I'm neither Japanese nor a father, it just seems so bizarre that, if your baby was switched out with someone else's in the hospital and you didn't find out until six years later, you wouldn't just keep the kid you already had rather than obsessing over your actual "blood" son. What our (fatherly) protagonist does in this movie is quite the opposite, and to me, that's not recognizably human behavior. Upset? Sure. But ready to abandon your own kid, whom (the movie is diligent to point out) you have already groomed as an expert pianist and achieving student? I don't see it. Grade: C+

Television

Lady Dynamite, Season 1 (2016)
Without a doubt, the strangest, most idiosyncratic series yet released by Netflix, a company that has never shied away from releasing strange, idiosyncratic series in the past. It's also perhaps the least accessible, and I'll admit that it took me a couple episodes to get on the show's manic (literally: Maria Bamford's autobiographical protagonist is frank about her struggles with bipolar II disorder) wavelength, which ricochets between screeching silliness to senseless absurdity to poignant character notes. The most obvious comparisons are to Louie, Master of None, and the myriad other comedians-play-themselves sitcoms that have sprung up in recent years, but what this show reminds me of most is Arrested Development, with its intricate plotting, clueless characters, and silly/satirical real-world analogies. But whereas AD relied on uncompromising objectivity for its humor, exposing the Bluths' foolishness through relentless refusal to play into any of the characters delusions, Lady Dynamite is notable for just how subjective everything is. Everything is definitively from Bamford's highly unreliable point of view, and that's where a lot of the humor (and pathos) comes from: the ways her world of talking pugs and quirky personal mentors end up flying right past the boundaries of reality. It's not going to be for everyone; Bamford's screeching, hyperactive persona is just this close to being grating, and, while funny, the early meta stuff the show tries (at times in the first few episodes, the action pulls back to reveal the studio setting and has the characters discuss the filming of the show itself) doesn't serve much of a purpose in the context of the season as a whole. But it's wholly unique and very funny, all the while finding a strange sort of sadness in its back half, and that counts for a lot. Grade: B+

Silicon Valley, Season 3 (2016)
By now, the show's success-undercut-by-failure-undercut-by-success formula is pretty obvious and predictable, but no matter: some of the greatest TV comedies of all time have thrived on predictability ("NORM!"). And while Silicon Valley isn't quite GOAT yet, it's still firing on all cylinders as one of the sharpest and funniest shows on TV right now, especially with season MVP T. J. Miller imbuing entrepreneur Erlich Bachman's sublime buffoonery with an unexpected level of emotional weight this year. The whole cast, though, is fantastic, the best comedy ensemble currently on TV (give or take a Brooklyn Nine-Nine), and showrunner Mike Judge's alternating sweet and acerbic sensibilities have never felt better suited to a setting than they have here in the tech capital of the country. Grade: A-

Books

It by Stephen King (1986)
Meandering and overlong (my Bible has more pages, but barely), It is the kind of novel that would eventually bring Stephen King out of his '70s/'80s hot streak into the relative valley of his mid-'90s output. But this isn't the '90s; it's the '80s, and King's still at the top of his game. It's bloated, yes, but it's also, in stretches, some of the very best work King has ever done. The novel is legitimately creepy, for one, and not just for the iconic Pennywise the Clown; the book is full of twisted, nightmarish imagery that draws on a host of phobias, including a climactic monster that, to this fragile mind, is even scarier than a clown. On a different note, his ability to spin pop cultural ephemera into something otherworldly and even mythical remains unparalleled—the novel's gradual transition from coming-of-age into cosmic horror is seamless and beautiful to behold—and his melancholic, even painful depiction of adolescence and growing up is so well-observed that it tugged some of my own experiences from the depths of my memory with a clarity so startling that it broke me down to tears. In the face of that, I'm more than willing to forgive some of the slack passages. Grade: A-

Prog Progress 1971: Van der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts

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.

Progressive rock came of age in a big way in 1971. Good progressive rock albums—even great ones—exist prior to 1971, and the general ethos of the genre had, by this time, permeated the European rock scene for a couple years at least. But when you scan the field for preexisting prog, there's just something smaller about it, some sense that, compared to where the genre would go, the bands just hadn't managed to realize the promise of their live shows and intellectual ambitions. As I pointed out last time, the boundaries between prog, metal, art rock, and pop were remarkably fluid in the UK, such that acts like David Bowie and The Beatles weren't meaningfully distinguished as separate from, say, Yes[1]. And then came 1971, and with it, a flood of prog classics. The Yes Album. Tarkus. Acquiring the Taste. Nursery Crime. Meddle. Freakin' Fragile. Major, career-defining works from major, genre-defining groups. These weren't albums you would ever think about lumping in with Bowie. With these releases—pretty much prog's Cambrian explosion
—progressive rock established itself as something strange, epic, and altogether different from what any other scene in rock music (even psychedelic rock) was doing. With 1971, genre boundaries were hardened; capes were donned.

Pawn Hearts, the fourth album by the Manchester-based Van der Graaf Generator, is not the best of the '71 bunch (that distinction would have to go to either Pink Floyd's Meddle or Yes's Fragile). But it may be the most important, because with Pawn Hearts comes (to my knowledge) the last prog innovation to graft itself onto the genre's DNA: the three-song album.

The three-song album usually goes a little something like this: one side of the LP has two songs, usually 9-10 minutes in length a piece, and usually both a bit light in tone, while the other side of the record has a single, epic suite that stretches anywhere from 17-24 minutes and is usually dark, brooding, and complex. It's a popular structure for progressive rock albums, the two most famous examples coming from Yes, with 1972's Close to the Edge and 1974's Relayer, and it's super effective at imbuing even a relatively slight 34-37 minute album with a sense of grandeur and scope while still giving the band a little room to play with different styles. And as far as I can tell, Van der Graaf got there first.

The idea of having one side of a rock LP be the "light" half with the poppy hits and the second side have the "experimental" stuff had been kicked around for a while before Pawn Hearts, all the way back to '60s Frank Zappa oddities and The Beatles' Abbey Road, and the idea of having a single track encompass an entire side of a 45" had been popular in jazz for well over a decade and had already been explored by rock-ish groups like Pink Floyd and Soft Machine (and even Bob Dylan) for a few years, too. But that specific, fruitful combination of having all the tracks be epic-length, with two of them being slightly less epic, was new. And it gave prog the idea, for better or for worse, that hey, maybe an album doesn't need poppy songs on its "light" side.

Arguably, prog would have gotten to that epiphany with or without Van der Graaf Generator's help. It definitely was moving in that direction already, especially with the increasingly a-melodic, avant-garde grooves of the likes of Soft Machine and Caravan in the Canterbury scene. But golly, if Pawn Hearts didn't give it a shove, because there's not a darn thing on this album that resembles anything close to a traditional pop/rock song, much less a radio hit[2]. The track length definitely has a lot to do with this: "Man-Erg," the second and shortest track, still weighs in at a hefty 10:25. Radio stations barely give half that time for "Hey Jude," much less a Van der Graaf Generator song.

Van der Graaf Generator's a weird band. I mean that in a few different ways. It's an eccentric collection of instrumentalists, for starters: Pawn Hearts alone features piano, organ, guitar[3], three kinds of saxophone, flute, synthesizer, mellotron, and something called a psychedelic razor, and that's not even taking into account the generally cacophonous production and idiosyncratic styles each of VdGG's four players give each of their instruments. Apparently one recording session involved the band recording sixteen (!!) different songs and then playing them back all simultaneously (according to band leader Peter Hammill, the resulting blast of Van der Graafs only made its way into about a minute's worth of the 23-minute closer, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers"). Other times, as in "Man-Erg," the band crashes screaming hard rock and impressionist saxophone blasts into delicate piano balladry. Even at the album's most melodic, the secondary and tertiary instruments deliver flairs of dissonance and avant-garde fragmentation. All this makes Peter Hammill's vocals (which are actually kind of lovely, echoing both the theatrics and versatility of David Bowie[4]) even more alien in context, again setting melody and pleasantry against a grain of experimentation. It's an odd, baffling sound that nowadays recalls, of all bands, Of Montreal in their noisier moments.

And it's not as if the lyrics help sooth any of this alienation. In pretty much every one of their albums, the band writes in dystopias and apocalypses. Their second record, The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other, closes with a spooky, synthesized voice shouting "total annihilation" just before leaning into a rollicking, repeating outro of "And when the water falls again, all is dead and nobody lives." Cheery stuff. Although Pawn Hearts doesn't have anything quite that bleak, all three of its songs definitely engage with dystopias of varying degrees. The opener, "Lemmings," describes what seems to be the collapse of a kingdom (or even civilization in general); the troubled speaker of "Man-Erg" faces a more existential threat, singing of how "A killer lives inside me" and eventually shrieking, in a rather frightening passage[5], "How can I be free? Am I really me?"; the epic closer, "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers," is sort of a combination of the first two, describing an unfortunate scenario in which someone experiences both interior and exterior apocalypses at the same time.

The extent to which you find all of this "good" is probably a good indication of how much you like prog in general. This intricate, chaotic sound and deadly serious writing definitely anticipates the genre's future, as more and more bands moved away from their playful, psychedelic roots and poppy whimsy and more toward increased complexity and stone-faced grandeur. When at the end of the '70s punk rockers sneered at prog, this is the sort of thing they had in mind[6]. This is prog, folks. Bask in the excess.

My personal take is that the album is overall pretty solid, though nowhere near as good as the best prog would have to offer even during this same year. It's not so much the intent or the disorienting instrumentals or the darkness. I actually really dig the darkness—prog could be pretty darn hippyish in its early-going, so it's nice to see some good, old-fashioned '70s malaise thrown in there. It's that those three—intention, instrumentals, and darkness—don't always synchronize as successfully as they should to make the album consistently engaging. When it's on, it's on: "Lemmings" is the best track here, and it's the place where all the various philosophical and musical impulses gel. At the album's best, the unease delivered by the bizarre instrumentation bolsters the unease expressed by the lyrics, and that's what's happening in "Lemmings" (not to mention that it's got a pretty cool riff at the "We have looked upon the heroes" part, although I'm pretty sure there isn't any guitar in there). It's also what's happening in that spooky mid-section of "Man-Erg." That song isn't nearly as successful overall, though, despite being the most lyrically interesting; its beginning minutes, which feature just piano and vocals, are too operatic for my tastes and stuffy in that '70s FM radio way that's kind of insufferable. "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" fares about in the middle, grouping some great passages with others that are awkward, overly portentous, or just plain dull. It also does this thing that a lot of early, lengthy prog tracks do, which is that it's more of a bunch of small song ideas stitched into a longer, lumpier mass—in fact, iTunes adds "(Medley)" to the end of the song title, and that seems about right.

Pawn Hearts has the reputation of being a prog classic. On artistic merits alone, I'm not sure if I can fully go along with that consensus. It certainly isn't bad (and I'd say it's good without quite being able to call it great), and it's a vital evolutionary step for the genre, which does make it essential listening for anyone looking to get a good historical survey of the progress of progressive rock, which—what do you know!—is exactly what I'm doing in this series. Good thing we stopped in, isn't it?

Until 1972!


1] In fact, future Yes pianist and general prog maximalist Rick Wakeman worked extensively on Bowie's 1971 Hunky Dory before eventually declining Bowie's invitation to join the Spiders From Mars in favor of a position in the Yes lineup. The genetics of early '70s British rock is a strange soup.

2] The lone single from the Pawn Hearts sessions, the instrumental "Theme One," doesn't even appear on the official UK release of the album, although US and Canadian versions shoved the track in between "Lemmings" and "Man-Erg" to create what Nirvana would call a "radio-friendly unit shifter." Apparently the band did not approve.

3] King Crimson's creative guide/guitarist extraordinaire Robert Fripp makes an appearance, too, although it's hard to pick him out with the (no joke) dozen tracks dubbed on one another.

4] Who, incidentally, was recording Hunky Dory at the same studio at the same time as VdGG were working on Pawn Hearts. Genetic soup, I'm telling you.

5] This is that part I was talking about earlier with the piano ballad colliding with all the avant-garde stuff. It's super effective at evoking the guy's state of mind.

6] Although interestingly, John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, was apparently a VdGG fan back in the day (no clue on what he thinks of them now).