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

Mini-Reviews for July 31 - August 6, 2017

Last day before students come back. Exciting stuff, sure, but I'll miss all that spare time.

Movies

Song to Song (2017)
Points to Terrance Malick for just how far off-brand he goes in Song to Song. This movie's 129 minutes show us scenes of graphic nudity, prostitution, lots of rock music, very little classical music, Flea and Patti Smith (both playing themselves), zero natural imagery, crowded urban spaces, and the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms (though honestly, it's amazing that it's taken so long for psychedelics to make it into a Malick film). However, if you've been paying attention to this director's post-Tree-of-Life output, this might not be all that strange to you, although Song to Song is certainly the most committed iteration of this new Malick, which generally involves a sort of feature-length video-essay on the intersection of contemporary urban/suburban design with modern psychological malaise. It's all very pretty and interestingly shot (as with last year's stellar Knight of Cups, this is all shot in digital, another new Malick quirk), the concrete, glass, and water of the modern city yearning for mystic grandeur like a hollow mimicry of the lush nature of The New World or Days of Heaven. But this is, by far, the most narrative-heavy of the recent Malick trilogy, and while I'm all for Malick returning to narrative film, there's just not a lot under the hood here. Knight of Cups turned its scenes into literal archetypes, with its convergences of Pilgrim's Progress with the Tarot deck, and Song to Song seems to have done the same thing but forgotten to tell us so—Ryan Gosling is an almost comically saintly figure (he's principled! he doesn't sell out his music! he cares for an aging relative!), Rooney Mara is adrift in a sexual odyssey of sorts as she works through the various ways modern society has made experiences hollow, and while there are some interesting wrinkles in the characters played by Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman (who have a profoundly twisted relationship, especially for a Malick film), the movie never really works through the trope-ish flatness of Gosling and Mara's characters. It ends strong with a tremendously sweet conclusion, but getting there is frequently cold and uninteresting. A noble attempt, to be sure, but it doesn't really amount to anything substantially successful. Grade: B-

The Lost City of Z (2016)
The film described in the reviews of The Lost City of Z's small village's worth of vocal advocates is recognizable enough to what I saw to let me know that I didn't watch a completely different movie. But... I dunno, guys. I see the pieces of a masterpiece, but they're never really coming together in the most powerful way. I'm not sure whether to blame the editing or the screenplay, both of which, I think, flub on the admittedly difficult task of compressing years of real history into something of a mystically charged tale of a man determined to find an ancient ruin in the heart of the Amazon. Or maybe it's that writer/director James Gray is hamstrung by being tied to actual history. Whatever the case, this movie's sweep feels weightless when it should be grand, and its philosophical impulses bump up against but never quite nail down profundity. The visuals are splendid, and on a scene-by-scene basis, the film is powerful. Coming together into a cumulative thing bigger than the sum of those parts, though, is something that still feels just outside the movie's grasp. Grade: B

The Hunter (2011)
This movie should be a lot better than it is—a spare, pristine ethics thriller about the intersection between commerce and violence and the natural world. And it kind of is that, in theory. But Willem Dafoe's mercenary hunter protagonist (hired, in the movie, to kill the last few Tasmanian tigers that keep the species from total extinction) remains a dark nothing at the center of the film that keeps anything from actually catalyzing, and the movie never really figures out his psychology on a holistic level. So we're stuck with this, mildly entertaining and not altogether "bad" but still not particularly compelling either. Grade: B-

Knowing (2009)
The film's numerology-mixed-with-Ancient-Aliens-mixed-with-the-Book-of-Revelation-mixed-with-M.-Night-Shyamalan screenplay is too sincerely dumb for most of the movie to transcend it. But I'll give it this: the final 15-ish minutes are absolutely breathtaking, mainly in a visual sense but also thematically—a demented inversion of Close Encounters of the Close Kind that's simultaneously horrifying and kind of wonderful, undergirded by some unconvincing but nevertheless breathtaking CGI. Too bad there are nearly two mediocre hours attached to that ending. Grade: C

I'm Not There. (2007)
An obvious companion to Haynes's Velvet Goldmine, I'm Not There is an impressionist, heavily art-house-ified treatment of the creative life of a cornerstone figure in rock history, as much cultural commentary as biopic. But whereas Velvet Goldmine is about the experience of rock fandom, filtering its not-quite David Bowie through the lens of journalists and, more significantly, young and impressionable teens, I'm Not There is a rendering of the experience of actually being the focus of that immense scrutiny and the various ways that celebrity and idolization fractures identity and compromises message—Bob Dylan is played by a whole host of actors ranging from kooky (Richard Gere, playing Dylan as Billy the Kid [whose allusion to Dylan's role in the Peckinpah movie does nothing to make the out-of-nowhere western scenes any less bizarre]) to brilliant (an Academy-Award-nominated Cate Blanchett plays the electric-era Dylan with an astounding fidelity to the Dylan seen in Dont Look Back and other artifacts from the era). Unlike with Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes was actually able to secure the rights to use the artist-of-focus's songs, so we're treated to a wall-to-wall Dylan soundtrack, which is an aural pleasure but might end up being the film's biggest misstep—the lack of actual Bowie songs in Velvet Goldmine lent a mythic, shape-shifting quality to the film that complicated its narrative's relationship to history, but while I'm Not There, with its intentional surreality and actor-jumbling, is much more forthrightly shape-shifting, the tying of it all to Dylan's actual music somehow makes the film a bit too literal in its approach to the artist, transforming his life into something of a solvable jigsaw puzzle of symbolism rather than the inscrutable mystery of Velvet Goldmine's central character. Which is not to say this is "bad" or even just "okay." It's very good, and you're unlikely to find a more interesting and visually distinctive depiction of celebrity in film. It's just the slightest bit frustrating to see a double instead of a home run, given the subject and style. Grade: B+

It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Despite the assertions of its poster, It Came From Outer Space is a mostly un-amazing, un-exciting, and un-spectacular sci-fi cheapie with fairly hoaky 3D effects. Its shape-shifting alien does feel like an antecedent to both Invasion of the Body Snatchers and John Carpenter's The Thing, which is worth something, I guess. But beyond historical curiosity, there's not a lot to be excited about her—certainly not the plot, whose third act wavers from "the aliens are evil!" to  "the aliens are just misunderstood!" to "the aliens are evil again, sort of!" to "but we kind of root for them anyway!" so quickly you'll barely have time to say, "Make up your mind already!" Grade: C+



Music

Arcade Fire - Everything Now (2017)
There's been something of a critical piling-on with indie stadium/art rockers Arcade Fire's fifth studio album, and I don't think that's quite fair, especially because the record contains some of their career-best material. I'm talking specifically about the triumphant title cut, the ABBA/Bowie fusion of our dreams, and the controversial "Creature Comfort," a nervy exploration of the ways the band may be complicit in the social structures that lead people to suicide that also has the best beat of the album. That said, the core critiques of the album aren't entirely off-base either; Everything Now is very much a concept album—and one insistent on dissecting the social ills of the melding of predatory capitalism with the "infinite content" of the Internet age. Arcade Fire have positioned themselves as something like 21st-century prophets since at least Neon Bible, so it's not as if that socially conscious reach is the problem in and of itself. However, no matter the intelligence of the ideas, the success of any concept album always lives and dies with the music, and there are definitely sections of Everything Now (the pretty weak middle "Peter Pan"-"Chemistry"-"Infinite Content/Infinite_Content" trio especially) where the album becomes more of an exercise in "I see what you did there" than anything truly felt. The good strongly outweighs the bad, but the bad is almost certainly the worst of their career. It's a solid effort but also the least-essential in Arcade Fire's discography. Grade: B

Favorite Music of 2013

Well, folks, it's almost the end of 2013, and you know what that means for the pop culture world: lists. Being the shameless trend-follower that I am, I decided to make a list of my own. So here it is. My favorite music of 2013.

It speaks to my unhealthy addiction to obsessing about pop culture that I managed to craft this post in the midst of end-of-semester projects and papers. Yeah, making lists like these is pretty self-indulgent (even more so in my case, considering I really know next to nothing about music), but I've been doing the whole self-indulgent-blogger thing for about five months already, so why stop now? I do realize that it's only the 7th of December, so this is technically my favorite 2013 music released between January 1st and December 7th. Having looked at the release schedule for the rest of the month, though, I don't think I'll be interested in anything else released this month.

Still, it's probably in my best interest to admit that this list was not made with any sort of comprehensive knowledge of 2013's musical output. Even not counting these last few weeks of December I'm ignoring, I'm sure there are many, many great albums and songs I've missed, especially because I have only a narrow exposure to this year's releases. Metal and rap, for example, are almost completely absent from this post because I don't keep up with either genre very closely. So if you think I've missed something great, let me know! I'm always open for music suggestions. Alternately, I realize this list (as well as all other pop culture lists) is a bit reductive and arbitrary, so if you disagree with my rankings, let me know that, too! Discussion is the great product of lists like these, and I wholeheatedly encourage it.

Sorry for all the wordiness, both in the above introduction and in the commentary below. Feel free to skip it all if you want. It won't hurt my feelings. Now, without further ado, let the listing commence.

Favorite Albums

1. Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City
Vampire Weekend shed most of their world-music and twee influences and upped the thematic heft of their lyrics, and they managed to do so without losing their ear for lightweight melody, by itself a great achievement. What's even more impressive is that in the process they created something that is actually profound, something I never expected of VW (a band I considered good but mostly just "for fun," whatever that means). Modern Vampires of the City is about the disconnect between doubt and faith that in the end comes down on the side of doubt, but what's great about it is its nuance in that position, making the faith just as appealing, if only romantically so. Very compelling stuff.

2. Arcade Fire: Reflektor
The rumors are true: Reflektor is too long, the lyrics can be overbearing, and it lacks the chest-thumping climax of previous Arcade Fire albums. It speaks to the towering achievement of Reflektor that even with those flaws, the Arcade Fire's latest is a near-masterpiece of rock theatrics. You'll be hard-pressed to find a band out there right now (especially in the increasingly complacent indie world that birthed AF) so committed the marriage of sonic expansion and conceptual complexity. More so than ever before, Arcade Fire's approach to music recalls the '70s heyday of Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and David Bowie, when rock was not only a sound but a medium for philosophical discourse.

3. The Knife: Shaking the Habitual
Before Shaking the Habitual, I hadn't listened to The Knife very much outside of "Heartbeats," the closest this duo every got to a hit song. With Shaking the Habitual, though, The Knife is about as far from "Heartbeats" as you could imagine. Gone are the electronica hooks, and in their place are dissonance, ambiance, and polyphonic rhythms. It's hypnotic and tense music full of strange left turns (19-minute ambient interlude, anyone?) and dance beats to soundtrack the most paranoid party you've ever been to. The whole thing takes some close listening to get into, but once you're on its brainwave, it's entirely worth the effort.

4. Janelle Monáe: The Electric Lady
When I wrote about Janelle Monáe's first album, The ArchAndroid, in my 2010 year-end list of albums (in one of those old-fashioned Facebook notes, no less—hello, old-school social media), I wrote that she was the only contemporary R&B artist I really liked. Well, things have changed in the three years since (both in my own musical tastes and the creatively renewed R&B scene), but Janelle Monáe is still the queen of whatever genre she decides to try on. The Electric Lady isn't quite as colorful as the kaleidoscopic ArchAndroid, more focused on soul and funk grooves, but it's still an inventive, danceable, and infectiously fun entry into Monáe's android world. Power up!

5. Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic
I don't really have anything to add to my initial write-up on this album and its position in the current musical landscape. It's a great album full of fun songs with great hooks, made even greater for people like me who hold an unabashed affection for the late-'60s underground scene its production mimics. Fans of Loaded rejoice!

6. Savages: Silence Yourself 
Sufjan Stevens may not have been a big fan of the font used on the cover (and I'm wont to agree with him—it's a bit cluttered, isn't it, folks?), but other than that, there's not much to complain about with Savages' debut. Propulsive tunes like "She Will" and "I Am Here" are give the record an awesomely primal punk sound, while pieces like "Waiting For a Sign" and "Marshall Dear" texture out the album with tinges of black metal and jazz. The way I'm talking about it kind of makes Savages' music sound academic, and in a sense it is. But really, Silence Yourself just rocks hard. Prepare to headbang.
 

7. My Bloody Valentine: m b v
I was still in diapers when the last (and long-presumed final) My Bloody Valentine record, Loveless, debuted, so I can't make any claims to the decades-long wait that some fans endured for this album. Still, having a new MBV album was an unexpected pleasure for me, and having that album somehow not turn into indie rock's Chinese Democracy (much less be this good) was an even greater pleasure. With the glut of dream pop/shoegaze that indie rock has experienced in recent years, it's pretty awesome that the granddaddy of the genre can still come back to teach everyone something new.

8. David Bowie: The Next Day 
Next in this year's "Surprise Art-Rock Return" is David Bowie, an artist who I (along with many others) assumed had entered that semi-retired, semi-nostalgic state of his career where he would churn a new single every few years just to let everyone know he was still alive (see also: The Rolling Stones). Boy was I wrong. With The Next Day, Bowie comes out of the gates swinging, delivering a smart, winning collection of hard rock ("The Next Day"), majestic ballads ("You Feel So Lonely You Could Die"), and classic-Bowie weirdness ("Dancing In Outer Space"). Semi-retired, nothing.

9. Jars of Clay: Inland 
I have a lot of problems with CCM (that's Contemporary Christian Music, for those of you unfamiliar with the wild, woolly world of Evangelical lingo). But Jars of Clay have always been a bright spot in the genre for me, and on this album, they've rarely been better. On Inland (without a doubt their best work since Good Monsters [by my money, still their masterpiece]), Jars of Clay deliver some of the most poignant and insightful lyrics of their career, set to some of their most adventurous musicianship in years. It's a compelling look at what it means to be aging, irrelevant, and Christian in 2013, and you'll be hard-pressed to find introspection that balances doubt and joy so well.

10. The National: Trouble Will Find Me 
Speaking of balancing doubt and joy... well, The National aren't so good at it. This Brooklyn quintet has always skewed much closer to the doubting (some might say despairing) end of the emotional spectrum, and this album is no different. Trouble Will Find Me shows The National in the rockingest mood they've been in since 2008's Boxer, but don't let the increased tempo fool you; these are still the same sad sacks we know and love, and the results are typically gorgeous. What's pleasantly surprising about this one, though, is that the band gets less and less dour as the album progresses, and by "Humiliation," the lyrics are actually playful. Maybe they're closer to joy than I think.


10 Great Songs Not On These Albums

Atoms for Peace: "Default"—While the Atoms for Peace album AMOK lacked the warmth and sparse sensuality that made Radiohead's underrated King of Limbs so enjoyable for me (was I the only one hoping Flea would play a more prominent role in AfP?), Thom Yorke's latest project yielded its fair share of good songs, most notably this one. "Default" is groovy and percussive and awesome in a way that Radiohead hasn't been for years.

Chance the Rapper: "Pusha Man (feat. Nate Fox & Lili K.)"—Chance the Rapper's mixtape Acid Rap was number 11 on the albums list, so really, the whole thing is worth a listen. But this song in particular captures the best of Chance the Rapper: the jazzy production, Chance's woozy delivery, the uneasiness with drug culture, and the tension between hedonism and social commentary that undergirds the whole mixtape.

The Civil Wars: "From This Valley"—This one's just gorgeous. There was apparently some intra-band turmoil leading up to the release of The Civil Wars' eponymous second album (so much so that it's kind of a surprise that there's an album at all), but you can't hear any of it on this song. It's a beautiful bit of country folk, and if we never hear anything else from The Civil Wars again, it might well be their mini-Abbey Road, for all the joy its 3:33 run time exudes.

Daft Punk: "Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams)"—Daft Punk albums tend to run a little long and tedious for my tastes (this year's Random Access Memories included), but taken in single doses, this duo can sure crank out some excellent tunes. Of the veritable tsunami of neo-disco that's come out in the past few years, "Get Lucky" is among the best, funkiest, and catchiest of them all, not to mention a pretty great return to pop songwriting by Daft Punk.

The Flaming Lips: "You Lust (feat. Phantogram)"—Has there ever been a group so determined to defy aging-rock-band conventions as The Flaming Lips? Thirty years into their careers, these guys are still constantly pushing themselves into new territories, be it 24-hour-long songs, Virgin Mobile commercials, possible Ke$ha collaborations, or, as is the case with "You Lust," 13-minute krautrock jams. "You Lust" sounds more like a cut from a Can or Kraftwerk album than anything from the band that released The Soft Bulletin, but that doesn't stop it from being a fantastically aggressive, provocative piece of music. It's dark stuff, to be sure, but it's also riveting to hear unfold.

Laura Marling: "Master Hunter"—This British folk singer channels Joni Mitchell and especially Led Zeppelin III-period Led Zeppelin, and the results are fantastic. Laura Marling delivers an awesome three minutes of progressive folk, sounding at once mythic and personal.

Saint Pepsi: "Call Me Maybe (SAINT PEPSI Edit)"—I've already written at length about my love for "Call Me Maybe," so I'll just leave you with this proposition: what if it were an R&B slow jam? Wonder no more.

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"—Even for someone like me who doesn't listen to a lot of radio Top 40, 2013 was a great year for pop music. Exhibit A: "Mirrors." While I never really got into the whole "JT pretends to be Stevie Wonder" shtick that was The 20/20 Experience, "Mirrors" hits that epic, melodic, just-cheesy-enough sweet spot that all Justin Timberlake songs should aim for. Don't listen to the radio edit; let all eight minutes of the album cut wash over you. An added bonus: the song also has a seriously great music video set to the eight-minute version.

Kanye West: "New Slaves"—Yeezus. Good grief. For every brilliant moment Kanye delivers on that album (and there are quite a few), there are at least three more eye-rolling, narcissistic, and straight-up ugly ones in close proximity. "New Slaves," however, manages to condense everything great about Yeezus (the noisy production, the social commentary, the classic-soul allusions) without absorbing the worst (the misogyny, the self-obsession, the *ugh* "Jesus wept" line). There's still plenty of ugliness in "New Slaves," but I'd argue that it's necessary ugliness in service of the song's razor-sharp criticism of consumerism. Kanye's often a provocateur, but when he's using that status to call out the racism in consumer culture and big business, I don't so much mind it.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Sacrilege"—Mosquito is not a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, but "Sacrilege," the lead single and opening track from that album, is most definitely a great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song. One of their best ever, I'd say. It takes the high production values and sweeping scope of their more recent albums and mixes it with the visceral impact of their earlier work. The end product is stunning.

Until next time!