Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Moved
Moving to Wordpress: theconsumption.wordpress.com. I think I just like it more... although I might come back to this someday.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
The Consumption: Reflections in a Golden Eye
Reflections opens with a quote from novelist Carson McCullers (upon whose book the film is based) stating "There is a fort in the south where a few years ago a murder was committed," and spends the rest of its two hours building towards that murder. It's a twist on the whodunnit, in that the motives are established long before the murder is committed; the question is simply which tensions will boil over first. In that regard, it's a fairly fascinating film, pitting well-developed archetypes against one another. There's Brando's general, a man so restrained that he doesn't so much as blink when a car crashes behind him, but whose repressed emotions are getting constantly nearer to the surface. He's contrasted with a soldier who is only comfortable when away from the base, and even then only when both he and his horse are bareback. Taylor as Brando's wife is promiscuous, flirtacious and free-spirited, the opposite of her stodgy husband; she's having an affair with another general whose wife is both neurotic and depressed, but somehow seems the most sane of the bunch. Or she would, if not for the influence of her effeminate Phillipino caregiver.
While that last one threatens to (and often does) border on camp, the setup would be easier to appreciate without Toshiro Mayuzumi's painfully overbearing score, which wrings every bit of tension it can out of scenes that would have more than enough atmosphere on their own. The last shot of the film also crosses the line into self-parody, which is a shame, because with just a little more restraint, it could have been an absolutely mesmerizing last image. It's easy to imagine the film's erotic elements (which include themes of voyeurism, domination and closeted sexuality) getting beefed up in a modern adaptation, and there are certainly the elements of a great film in the framework, but it feels like the work of a director trying to find his way into the (then-)new American cinema, and not quite succeeding.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Transcript: John Hillcoat interview, The Road
I guess it's a good enough time to publish the rest of my interview with The Road director John Hillcoat. I had the good fortune to speak with him back in September at the Toronto film fest, which led to a cover feature in Fast Forward in November, but here's the raw transcript, where Mr. Hillcoat talks about the film's optimism, the trickier aspects of adaptation and why he wanted to avoid looking like Mad Max.
Had you read the book before you were approached to do the film?
I actually got the unpublished manuscript – that’s how it started. I don’ think I would have actually been able to make this film if I didn’t get it unpublished , because once it went on to the Pulitzer prize, I’m sure there would have been half a dozen other people on top of it. So I was very lucky in that sense.
I mean, Blood Meridian was a big influence on The Proposition, my last film, but yeah, it just, when I got the manuscript, it had a huge impact on me.
What was it that connected with you?
It was just the emotional love story. It was so poignant and heart-breaking. It had quite an impact.
Some people talk about it as being a very cinematic book, because of the setting. But plot-wise, there’s huge stretches of just hunger and foraging.
Which you can get away with in a novel. Novels have a different rhythm. You can’t get away with that kind of repetition in film.
Were you at all apprehensive about mapping that atmosphere to a film?
I was also, the idea of just two people on a journey that are in every scene — you’re just with a father and son from beginning to end, so that was a bit of a mental leap, how that was going to work cinematically and how you could keep that emotionally alive. In a book, you can go any place and it’s all in your head, and there’s the poetry of the language. It’s a different medium. But when you physicalize with film, you make it a physical... you become like this witness to... actual people embody those characters, and you witness them and under closer inspection in a way. It’s more laid bare, strangely.
In the book, there’s a great deal of ambiguity regarding both the origin of the Apocalypse and the background of the characters. How much of that did you fill in for yourself during the filming?
I found that one of the most simple and refreshing things about it, because when I heard — I love McCarthy’s work, but when I heard, when Nick Wexler, the producer, said I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished, I got really excited. And then when he said “It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,” my heart actually sank, because, for me, apocalyptic genre has got such a pre-conceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head. And one of the things that it did, which was quite ingenious and made it immediately authentic and placed you in the here and now and put the spotlight on the human relationship was simply not making a film all about the event. Because then I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much about what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters. It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride that you don’t even have a human connection to it, in a way. It’s more like a fantasy film.
I take it you didn’t look to other post-apocalyptic films for inspiration?
Well, I ended up actually looking at films like The Bicycle Thieves, which is a father-and-son relationship thing where they’re really under pressure, and how did they behave as human beings. That kind of thing. And Grapes of Wrath came to mind. So it’s actually, and it also seemed really familiar, the world, the simple thing of a shopping cart with all your possessions, you know, that is the homeless living in every city. So, it just had a much more real kind of grounding, and it was more about America now and the world now than the future. I know that sounds a bit strange.
Some of the filming took place in New Orleans, Mt. St. Helens, some of the most devastated areas you could find. How did it affect the emotions to do the filming in that kind of environment?
Well, that made it more poignant and it also helped, particularly Viggo and Kodi, it really helped them really feel and absorb that extreme pressure and tap into that world. We act off it like you’d react off of another character, or another person, I mean. And I think for actors, that really helped. It made the whole crew, including all the cast, it gave it a poignancy that I think was a really positive force.
Specifically in New Orleans, timing-wise, how close was that to the actual hurricane?
Well, there’s even, we were lucky to find, I tracked down 70mm IMAX footage that was shot two days after Katrina hit. And there’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real. The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour, but the actual objects and everything in that frame is – other than those things I mentioned – is real. And then the shopping mall, the abandoned shopping mall, and there were several scenes where the only thing really was the sky, and we had to cut out some of the traffic and things like that in the background. So, in other words, it was still in the process of clean-up, so it ranged between late last year and 2 days after.
I remember seeing the shot of the ships and wondering how they could possibly have ended up on top of a road.
See, that’s the thing. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. But I think there was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples; otherwise it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of. It’s too alienating. It’s like just a videogame, in a way, with all that CGI.
Plus, the tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic films isn’t exactly...
At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film, it was an adventure film. It was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. There were actually elements that — in the book, there was an army of people in chains, including slaves and masks, and boiler suits, and that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well, so... And I was pleased to find out that a lot of people who have read the book felt [the film] was similar to the kinds of images they had go through their head.
The Man is pretty far removed from the typical movie hero ‑ he’s constantly considering killing his own child, for one thing, even if it is for valid reasons. Is it hard to take a character like that and make them sympathetic on the screen?
I think the key is, I mean, Viggo was really emotionally throws himself into this stuff, and I think the key is to understand the pressures that he’s in. Actually, it’s the kid that teaches the man. As the man, we all... I think fear is a big part of our world, there’s a lot of fear out there at the moment, and I think it shuts off doors, and that’s what we witness is, under pressure, people start to shut down and their moral compass can start to sway. And we see that, but I think because we see it as a gradual thing, I think it’s a way of understanding why he’s doing that. In a way, if you put yourself in his shoes, which I think happens, then you can accept it. But the boy is, you know, it’s a love story and he really is doing it out of love. He’s doing it with the best intentions, and I think that’s the difference. And admittedly, that starts to be counter-productive, but then he learns from the boy. The boy picks him up on that, and the boy is the one who takes the leap of faith that I think liberates the fear, and to me, that’s the moral of the parable and the tale, is that what makes us human is very delicate and very special, and we have to cling on to that. And sometimes that means taking a leap of faith.
Do you see it as an optimistic film?
Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing that, it’s a little bit frustrating because I just think it’s so emotionally clear, but people get distracted by the literalness of the apocalypse, and it is a projection of our worst fears as parents and as humans, facing a potential ending, and then how does one generation move on to another? And really, that’s what it is. For Cormack, he said it’s a book about human goodness. It was very personal, it was dedicated to his own son, and in that sense, it’s incredibly — I looked at a lot of father-son films, and was amazed at how many are tyrannical or absent or dysfunctional, and so I think in this way, it’s a very positive... and it’s really about what we take for granted. It’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of. The fact that the man learns from the boy, in a way is saved, emotionally, or you can see that as spiritual, any way that you want to read it, the point is, there is a shift. And that shift is extremely hopeful — and actually the essence of what hope is, I think.
It isn’t until they embrace hope that they can stop being two isolated people and join with others.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that Cormack is so unflinching in his examination of how people behave, and I think that’s why it’s so poignant, and it really makes you think because it’s so adept at showing that. To me it was a beautiful love story, and same to Viggo and the boy, Kodi, and everyone involved, actually. We all saw that, and we always tried to protect that as well, because you could get overwhelmed. If you put in too much stuff, the other stuff, then the balance is shaken.
One scene in the book that didn’t make it into the film that surprised me is the one where The Man finds the apple husks. To me, the enourmity of that small victory really captured the characters’ lot. How do you decide which scenes make it in and which don’t?
To me, the Coca-Cola scene was like that, and finding the bunker was even more so, and the insects that they found, that little bit of munching — we tried to get a balance. We actually filmed that, the apple...
There’s also, the most controversial scene of the book [baby-eating], we found the world was so defined by that point that it was like over-doing it. It was too much, because it was physical and real, it was just too much, like we were trying too hard, almost.
The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormack himself loved it, and when he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book, for him. Apart from four lines that were very special that we did film, and that we did put back in. All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
Which four lines?
When the boy simply says ‘What would you do if I died,’ and the father says ‘I’d want to die, too.’ ‘So you could be with me?’ ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ So it’s just this beautiful exchange that actually mirrors what’s to come... Foreshadows as a mirroring. And it’s a beautiful kind of thing to say.
All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
I actually got the unpublished manuscript – that’s how it started. I don’ think I would have actually been able to make this film if I didn’t get it unpublished , because once it went on to the Pulitzer prize, I’m sure there would have been half a dozen other people on top of it. So I was very lucky in that sense.
I mean, Blood Meridian was a big influence on The Proposition, my last film, but yeah, it just, when I got the manuscript, it had a huge impact on me.
What was it that connected with you?
It was just the emotional love story. It was so poignant and heart-breaking. It had quite an impact.
Some people talk about it as being a very cinematic book, because of the setting. But plot-wise, there’s huge stretches of just hunger and foraging.
Which you can get away with in a novel. Novels have a different rhythm. You can’t get away with that kind of repetition in film.
Were you at all apprehensive about mapping that atmosphere to a film?
I was also, the idea of just two people on a journey that are in every scene — you’re just with a father and son from beginning to end, so that was a bit of a mental leap, how that was going to work cinematically and how you could keep that emotionally alive. In a book, you can go any place and it’s all in your head, and there’s the poetry of the language. It’s a different medium. But when you physicalize with film, you make it a physical... you become like this witness to... actual people embody those characters, and you witness them and under closer inspection in a way. It’s more laid bare, strangely.
In the book, there’s a great deal of ambiguity regarding both the origin of the Apocalypse and the background of the characters. How much of that did you fill in for yourself during the filming?
I found that one of the most simple and refreshing things about it, because when I heard — I love McCarthy’s work, but when I heard, when Nick Wexler, the producer, said I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished, I got really excited. And then when he said “It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,” my heart actually sank, because, for me, apocalyptic genre has got such a pre-conceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head. And one of the things that it did, which was quite ingenious and made it immediately authentic and placed you in the here and now and put the spotlight on the human relationship was simply not making a film all about the event. Because then I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much about what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters. It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride that you don’t even have a human connection to it, in a way. It’s more like a fantasy film.
I take it you didn’t look to other post-apocalyptic films for inspiration?
Well, I ended up actually looking at films like The Bicycle Thieves, which is a father-and-son relationship thing where they’re really under pressure, and how did they behave as human beings. That kind of thing. And Grapes of Wrath came to mind. So it’s actually, and it also seemed really familiar, the world, the simple thing of a shopping cart with all your possessions, you know, that is the homeless living in every city. So, it just had a much more real kind of grounding, and it was more about America now and the world now than the future. I know that sounds a bit strange.
Some of the filming took place in New Orleans, Mt. St. Helens, some of the most devastated areas you could find. How did it affect the emotions to do the filming in that kind of environment?
Well, that made it more poignant and it also helped, particularly Viggo and Kodi, it really helped them really feel and absorb that extreme pressure and tap into that world. We act off it like you’d react off of another character, or another person, I mean. And I think for actors, that really helped. It made the whole crew, including all the cast, it gave it a poignancy that I think was a really positive force.
Specifically in New Orleans, timing-wise, how close was that to the actual hurricane?
Well, there’s even, we were lucky to find, I tracked down 70mm IMAX footage that was shot two days after Katrina hit. And there’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real. The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour, but the actual objects and everything in that frame is – other than those things I mentioned – is real. And then the shopping mall, the abandoned shopping mall, and there were several scenes where the only thing really was the sky, and we had to cut out some of the traffic and things like that in the background. So, in other words, it was still in the process of clean-up, so it ranged between late last year and 2 days after.
I remember seeing the shot of the ships and wondering how they could possibly have ended up on top of a road.
See, that’s the thing. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. But I think there was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples; otherwise it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of. It’s too alienating. It’s like just a videogame, in a way, with all that CGI.
Plus, the tradition of Australian post-apocalyptic films isn’t exactly...
At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film, it was an adventure film. It was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. There were actually elements that — in the book, there was an army of people in chains, including slaves and masks, and boiler suits, and that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well, so... And I was pleased to find out that a lot of people who have read the book felt [the film] was similar to the kinds of images they had go through their head.
The Man is pretty far removed from the typical movie hero ‑ he’s constantly considering killing his own child, for one thing, even if it is for valid reasons. Is it hard to take a character like that and make them sympathetic on the screen?
I think the key is, I mean, Viggo was really emotionally throws himself into this stuff, and I think the key is to understand the pressures that he’s in. Actually, it’s the kid that teaches the man. As the man, we all... I think fear is a big part of our world, there’s a lot of fear out there at the moment, and I think it shuts off doors, and that’s what we witness is, under pressure, people start to shut down and their moral compass can start to sway. And we see that, but I think because we see it as a gradual thing, I think it’s a way of understanding why he’s doing that. In a way, if you put yourself in his shoes, which I think happens, then you can accept it. But the boy is, you know, it’s a love story and he really is doing it out of love. He’s doing it with the best intentions, and I think that’s the difference. And admittedly, that starts to be counter-productive, but then he learns from the boy. The boy picks him up on that, and the boy is the one who takes the leap of faith that I think liberates the fear, and to me, that’s the moral of the parable and the tale, is that what makes us human is very delicate and very special, and we have to cling on to that. And sometimes that means taking a leap of faith.
Do you see it as an optimistic film?
Absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing that, it’s a little bit frustrating because I just think it’s so emotionally clear, but people get distracted by the literalness of the apocalypse, and it is a projection of our worst fears as parents and as humans, facing a potential ending, and then how does one generation move on to another? And really, that’s what it is. For Cormack, he said it’s a book about human goodness. It was very personal, it was dedicated to his own son, and in that sense, it’s incredibly — I looked at a lot of father-son films, and was amazed at how many are tyrannical or absent or dysfunctional, and so I think in this way, it’s a very positive... and it’s really about what we take for granted. It’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of. The fact that the man learns from the boy, in a way is saved, emotionally, or you can see that as spiritual, any way that you want to read it, the point is, there is a shift. And that shift is extremely hopeful — and actually the essence of what hope is, I think.
It isn’t until they embrace hope that they can stop being two isolated people and join with others.
Exactly. Exactly. And I think that Cormack is so unflinching in his examination of how people behave, and I think that’s why it’s so poignant, and it really makes you think because it’s so adept at showing that. To me it was a beautiful love story, and same to Viggo and the boy, Kodi, and everyone involved, actually. We all saw that, and we always tried to protect that as well, because you could get overwhelmed. If you put in too much stuff, the other stuff, then the balance is shaken.
One scene in the book that didn’t make it into the film that surprised me is the one where The Man finds the apple husks. To me, the enourmity of that small victory really captured the characters’ lot. How do you decide which scenes make it in and which don’t?
To me, the Coca-Cola scene was like that, and finding the bunker was even more so, and the insects that they found, that little bit of munching — we tried to get a balance. We actually filmed that, the apple...
There’s also, the most controversial scene of the book [baby-eating], we found the world was so defined by that point that it was like over-doing it. It was too much, because it was physical and real, it was just too much, like we were trying too hard, almost.
The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormack himself loved it, and when he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book, for him. Apart from four lines that were very special that we did film, and that we did put back in. All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
Which four lines?
When the boy simply says ‘What would you do if I died,’ and the father says ‘I’d want to die, too.’ ‘So you could be with me?’ ‘Yes, so I could be with you.’ So it’s just this beautiful exchange that actually mirrors what’s to come... Foreshadows as a mirroring. And it’s a beautiful kind of thing to say.
All those other scenes and events, he felt we picked the essence.
The Consumption: December 12
December has been conspiring against me. Illness, funerals and car-related frustrations have abounded, but I'm currently rebounding, and set to continue my quest to document all the media I consume. All I need now is willpower.
PS: Coming next week -- a full transcription of my interview with Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus director Terry Gilliam. Good times.
FILM: Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog: Somehow, despite my fondness for free things, Joss Whedon and musicals, I missed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog the first time around. I've liked it in principle, at least, for quite a while now -- the idea that talented people could put a project together as a lark when a strike kept them from doing anything on a bigger scale, well, that seems like something that should happen more often. Imagine if Terry Gilliam experimented with backyard movies between his quixotic alternate-reality blockbusters, or if the Coens and Sam Raimi pieced together bloody marvels to work through their writer's block. But the worry was that liking Dr. Horrible in principle would be easier than practice. Despite the pedigree, it has all the hallmarks of a particularly cutesy vanity project.
So, colour me impressed. Sure, Neil Patrick Harris's voice is a touch reedy, and Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer costume is possibly too cheap for even such an on-the-fly production, but the thing still fires on all cylinders, to use an entirely inappropriate cliche. Harris's cutesiness is actually an advantage, as it's the fulcrum on which the entire ending pivots (to belabour things further); if he were at all sinister, there'd be no shock in seeing him become a genuine, remorseless villain. Light-hearted songs, a bummer of an ending and a solid twist on the villian origin story -- not a bad way to spend your time off.
FILM: Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut): A mostly dirt-free but nonetheless informative look behind the scenes at the Python crew. The five-part doc methodically chronicles the group's origins and influences before moving on to the TV series and films, although it shies away from any "where are they now" treatment of the members' post-Python careers. The surviving Pythons are both candid and friendly in their description of events -- they admit to disagreements and pay the occasional backhanded compliment, but there's no real bitterness to be found. For something as absurd and silly as Python, any sort of rational doc would seem to at least somewhat miss the point, but Lawyer's Cut does a more-than-efficient job of telling its story.
PS: Coming next week -- a full transcription of my interview with Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus director Terry Gilliam. Good times.
FILM: Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog: Somehow, despite my fondness for free things, Joss Whedon and musicals, I missed Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog the first time around. I've liked it in principle, at least, for quite a while now -- the idea that talented people could put a project together as a lark when a strike kept them from doing anything on a bigger scale, well, that seems like something that should happen more often. Imagine if Terry Gilliam experimented with backyard movies between his quixotic alternate-reality blockbusters, or if the Coens and Sam Raimi pieced together bloody marvels to work through their writer's block. But the worry was that liking Dr. Horrible in principle would be easier than practice. Despite the pedigree, it has all the hallmarks of a particularly cutesy vanity project.
So, colour me impressed. Sure, Neil Patrick Harris's voice is a touch reedy, and Nathan Fillion's Captain Hammer costume is possibly too cheap for even such an on-the-fly production, but the thing still fires on all cylinders, to use an entirely inappropriate cliche. Harris's cutesiness is actually an advantage, as it's the fulcrum on which the entire ending pivots (to belabour things further); if he were at all sinister, there'd be no shock in seeing him become a genuine, remorseless villain. Light-hearted songs, a bummer of an ending and a solid twist on the villian origin story -- not a bad way to spend your time off.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Catching up: More consumption
Personal life made it tricky to post in the last week or so, so here's a bit of catch-up:
CONCERT: Billy Bragg with Ron Hawkins and Kris Demeanor at Jack Singer: Uptown (Winnipeg's alt.weekly) called Ron Hawkins one of the most underappreciated singer-songwriters in Canada, and if his opening set's any indication, chalk me up as one of the underappreciators. Not that there was anything particularly wrong with his straightforward folk songs, but there wasn't much to make you catch notice, either.
Demeanor, on the other hand, knows how to make the most of his single-guitar set-up. As good as he is when his Crack Band is around, his solo sets are something else altogether, crackling with energy and integrating the best parts of beat poetry and singer-songwriter tradition without settling into a coffee-house rut. "Practice" (about a string of near-non-existent international relationships) was a highlight, but "I Have Seen the Future" is still the showstopper. (Check out the award-winning animated short video for that below).
What can you say about Bragg? He brought a polished show, talking to the crowd at length about everything from American football (or "runny runny catchy," as he calls it) to the benefits of Rock Band on a new generation of music fans to the Mermaid Avenue project (whose Woody Guthrie tunes were a highlight of the set). Some nice touches: When he switched to acoustic, Bragg told the crowd that "now's the time to call me Judas," and the guitar itself had "This machine kills time" stenciled on it, a clevernod to Guthrie. By the time his set neared the two-hour mark, the banter seemed a bit much and the tunes dragged a bit, but the rousing rendition of "There is Power in a Union" was a perfect end to the set proper, even if the crowd steadfastly refused to sing or clap along.
FILM: The Fantastic Mr. Fox: Reviews of movies like this often get bogged in the question of "How will this play to kids?" Put simply, I don't care. Wes Anderson's take on Roald Dahl's story is so consistent with the director's other work that adults could be forgiven for forgetting that the movie's being marketed to 12-year-olds. The concessions to younger viewers (say, replacing all swear words with "cuss") could just be considered quirks on par with The Life Aquatic's Portuguese Bowie soundtrack, and while the setting and animation are plenty vibrant, the voicework (featuring Anderson's usual roster -- Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, etc, plus a note-perfect George Clooney) contains plenty of Anderson's usual deadpan melancholy. In other words, it's really just a more fantastical extension of Royal Tennenbaums and Rushmore which, if it doesn't exactly speak to the director's diversity, certainly speaks to his singular style.
FILM: In the Loop: This British film is supposedly a comedy, but while it is hilarious from start to finish, in practice it plays more like a tragedy. There's certainly very little silly about it, and despite a mood that sometimes seems borrowed from deadpan British exports like The Office, it's also not an awkwardness-comedy. Instead, it's a deeply cynical satire on the political process, a film about the origins of war that places the blame more on petty egos and offhanded rhetoric than on overarching conspiracies or evil megalomaniacs. There are plenty of loudmouthed bullies, snivelling sycophants and ambitious fools to go around, but the atmosphere feels like high school politics with calamitous stakes. The one thing it does share with The Office, though, is that it's far from a feel-good comedy -- you'll laugh, but leave the film praying (and doubting) that its portrayal of backroom dealings is exaggerated.
FILM: Zelig: Woody Allen's one-per-year approach to filmmaking hasn't led to quite as many stylistic oddities as you might expect, but Zelig is one of the exceptions. Presented as a newsreel documentary examining a great but forgotten personality of the 20s and 30s, the film is a lighthearted detour that travels some of the same ground as Forrest Gump without the schmaltz. Zelig's title character (played by Allen) is an absolute nobody, a personality so meek that he copes by blending in perfectly with whoever is around him -- even to the point of physically transforming, which leads to shots of Allen in blackface and other racial garb that would be offensive if it weren't just silly. He's eventually treated by a psychiatrist (Mia Farrow, in one of her first collaborations with Allen) and taught to integrate into modern society. As the film is heavy on narration, the performances are all slight -- there's simply not enough screen time given to the characters to allow for any depth. Instead, Allen relies on a whimsical story and then-impressive special effects integrating Allen into some key historical scenes. It's a fun, interesting oddity from the director, but he was wise to keep it under the 80-minute mark, as it already starts to wear thin by the end.
BOOK: Worlds of Power: Ninja Gaiden: When I was in elementary school, I had two books in a thoroughly ridiculous series of novelizations based on N.E.S. games. Early this year, I had an idea for a project: Collect the rest (or get them from the library, at least) and do a series of blog posts reviewing each one. The inter-library loans have been slow in coming, so a year later, Ninja Gaiden is only the second I've read (after the side-scrolling Blaster Master adaptation). Both books (which are written under the amazing pen name F.X. Nine) are perfectly awful examples of kid-lit, but where Blaster Master took great pains to explain how video game oddities like health powerups could exist in its world, Ninja Gaiden is content to overwhelm its readers with the sheer awesomeness of being a capital-N Ninja. Expanding the storyline beyond the usual N.E.S. formula of "run to the right and kill things" leads to a bizarre plot involving an orphaned 16-year-old Ninja, an ancient conspiracy, CIA double-crosses and a sub-plot that verges on establishing a love interest without ever getting into that icky kissing stuff, but the highlight of both books has got to be the apologetic 'If you liked this, you might like...' tacked onto the end, which spotlights genuine adventure and science fiction classics. You get the sense that F.X. Nine is secretly hoping to help kids realize his books are bunk, but the powers that be won't let him flat-out say it.
BOOK: Monster, 1959: The trouble with trying to satirize an era half-a-century after the fact is that what would have once been timely references now feel like knowing nudges. David Maine's Monster, 1959 is heavily inspired by creature fare like King Kong, Godzilla and their more ridiculous (and largely forgotten) ilk, with the novel twist of being written largely from the perspective of the book's creature, K., a giant lizard-ape-butterfly-thing kidnapped from its island home to be put on display in America. While the attempts to understand a beast that hardly even possesses the capacity for thought leads to some interesting passages, the references to political events, actors and films feel shoe-horned in rather than natural, and the message that even the heros in squeaky-clean B-flicks probably had less than squeaky-clean lives is a bit ham-handed. As an action-adventure, it's a good yarn, but as political commentary, it's like a more-forced Tom Robbins without the absurdist humour.
Demeanor, on the other hand, knows how to make the most of his single-guitar set-up. As good as he is when his Crack Band is around, his solo sets are something else altogether, crackling with energy and integrating the best parts of beat poetry and singer-songwriter tradition without settling into a coffee-house rut. "Practice" (about a string of near-non-existent international relationships) was a highlight, but "I Have Seen the Future" is still the showstopper. (Check out the award-winning animated short video for that below).
What can you say about Bragg? He brought a polished show, talking to the crowd at length about everything from American football (or "runny runny catchy," as he calls it) to the benefits of Rock Band on a new generation of music fans to the Mermaid Avenue project (whose Woody Guthrie tunes were a highlight of the set). Some nice touches: When he switched to acoustic, Bragg told the crowd that "now's the time to call me Judas," and the guitar itself had "This machine kills time" stenciled on it, a clevernod to Guthrie. By the time his set neared the two-hour mark, the banter seemed a bit much and the tunes dragged a bit, but the rousing rendition of "There is Power in a Union" was a perfect end to the set proper, even if the crowd steadfastly refused to sing or clap along.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Desolation Road -- Interview with John Hillcoat + post-apocalypse sidebar
Even within the pantheon of post-apocalyptic fiction, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is bleak. The book’s heroes are an unnamed father and son, both perpetually verging on death in an inhospitable America. An unexplained disaster has drained the colour from the sky and left a coating of ash over the ground, transforming the landscape into greyscale. Derelict buildings and lifeless forests serve as pale reminders of the way things used to be. The book’s villain is not some contrived cult or band of malevolent mutants, but hunger and the lengths to which men will go to stave off starvation.
Even McCarthy’s prose is stripped of any embellishment. Entire pages pass without an unnecessary flourish, not even so much as a comma. The starkness of the language seems essential to the story, bringing a poetry to long stretches that consist of little more than hunger and endless hiking. How the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007 is obvious; still, it doesn’t seem like obvious fodder for multiplexes.
Although the Coen brothers have proven that McCarthy’s books could succeed both critically and commercially with their Oscar-winning adaptation of No Country for Old Men, it’s understandable that director John Hillcoat had trepidations about filming The Road. Even beyond capturing the author’s singular voice, there was the issue of doing something new in a post-apocalyptic world, a genre with well-established trappings.
“When [The Road’s producer] Nick Wexler said, ‘I’m sending you McCarthy’s new book, unpublished,’ I got really excited,” Hillcoat recalls. “Then when he said, ‘It’s an apocalyptic story about a father and son,’ my heart actually sank, because, for me, the apocalyptic genre has got such a preconceived idea, and I’ve got the same baggage most people have when you say that. And then I realized when I read the book, of course, it immediately turned that on its head.”
As Hillcoat explains, McCarthy’s decision to skip over the actual apocalyptic event kept the book from bogging down in genre conventions. The Road, both in film and book form, is concerned with the human aftermath, not big explosions and the end of the world.
“I realized, actually, that’s the thing about apocalyptic genre that I don’t like — or I can appreciate it in a different way, but it’s not my kind of thing — is the event becomes so much what it’s all about that it overrides even the human characters,” he explains. “It becomes such a spectacle, such a roller-coaster ride, that you don’t even have a human connection to it. It’s more like a fantasy film.”
Hillcoat’s film is no roller-coaster, but it is a spectacle in its own way. The director realized that without McCarthy’s language to carry the story, the weight of the film would fall on the visuals. Rather than rely on computer wizardry to create the devastated landscapes that Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee wander through, Hillcoat chose to film in real-world locations that had undergone their own small-scale apocalypses. Coal fields and a burnt-down amusement park in Pennsylvania and the slopes of Mount St. Helens required only minor digital tweaking to suit the director’s vision, and one of the film’s most impressive shots came from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“There’s an image of two ships sitting on a freeway, and that, literally, is all real,” Hillcoat says. “The only thing we did is blend it into our world, which meant no blue sky, so we replaced the sky and replaced some of the colour. But the actual objects and everything in that frame is real. Reality sometimes outstrips fiction. There was just such an authenticity and reality to the book, and it was so vast, we had to really go to those examples. Otherwise, it would be back in that post-apocalyptic world that I’ve seen enough of.”
The director’s aversion to post-apocalyptic fiction likely stems from the genre’s ties to Australia. Though he spent his childhood in Hamilton, Ont., Hillcoat was born in Queensland, Australia, and he has directed three feature-length films in his home country, including the Nick Cave-scripted western The Proposition. It’s only natural that the director wanted to distance himself from the conventions of a genre that was codified three decades ago by his countryman George Miller in the muscle-car-and-studded-leather classic Mad Max.
“At the time, Mad Max was extraordinary, but it was more a samurai film,” Hillcoat says. “It was an adventure film — it was more pure genre. This kind of takes the genre in a different place. In [McCarthy’s] book, there was an army of people with chains, including slaves and masks and boiler suits that we actually chose not to go to, because of Mad Max. We tried to just ground it more in reality, but I think ultimately, that was the spirit of the book as well.”
For inspiration, Hillcoat instead turned to films like John Ford’s dust-bowl parable The Grapes of Wrath and Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, set in post-Second World War Italy. While neither film’s setting is quite as dramatic as The Road’s wasteland, their focus on family relationships is closer to the heart of McCarthy’s novel than any adventure story could be.
“For Cormac, he said it’s a book about human goodness,” the director recalls. “It’s really about what we take for granted — it’s a wake-up call to say how special and fragile things are, and under pressure you get to see what we’re really made of.”
“The thing I’m most happy about is that Cormac himself loved it,” he continues. “When he saw the film, he felt there was nothing missing from the book for him.... He felt we picked the essence.”
CINEMATIC WASTELAND
John Hillcoat may want to distance himself from the big screen’s post-apocalyptic tradition, but that doesn’t mean you have to. Here’s a brief introduction to some classic (and not-so-classic) cinematic wastelands.
On the Beach (1959) — Even in the ’50s, Armageddon always seems to happen in Australia. In this adaptation of Nevil Shute’s novel, Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and Anthony Perkins face the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Planet of the Apes (1968) — Even with the cheesy costumes and Charlton Heston’s teeth-gritting overacting, the original is still worlds better than Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.
A Boy and His Dog (1975) —One of the strangest post-apocalyptic films out there stars a young Don Johnson and his telepathic dog, and the plot revolves around an underground sect that wants the virile Johnson to impregnate their women.
Mad Max (1979) — Before The Passion of the Christ, before the buddy-cop comedies, even before the sex symbol status, Mel Gibson was Max, just a humble cop avenging his family’s murder. Followed by The Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, with a fourth film rumoured for a 2011 release.
The Quiet Earth (1985) — Zac Hobson awakens to find that the rest of the world has disappeared. One of the better last-man-on-Earth movies out there (see also: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971) and I Am Legend (2007), all based on Richard Matheson’s novel, I Am Legend).
Doomsday (2008) — After a deadly virus forces the entirety of Scotland to be quarantined, the populace quickly embraces feudalism and cannibalism. Blatantly rips off everything from Mad Max to Escape from New York and Aliens, and has a lot of trashy fun in the process.
Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom Live review
Official review ended up a touch more positive than the first impression...
Though it dips back as far as 1985’s Rain Dogs (and the live performances it draws from went even further), Glitter and Doom mostly spotlights Waits’s post-Big Time catalogue. The set list, cherry-picked from performances throughout Waits’s 2008 tour, wanders through nearly every album the singer has released in the last two decades, even the soundtrack to The Black Rider, Waits’s collaboration with William Burroughs.
Waits is in full-on bluster mode for much of Glitter. Fortunately, his bellowing doesn’t overwhelm the songs — “Dirt in the Ground” is just as effective with Waits using his lower register instead of Bone Machine’s strained falsetto — but the cumulative effect can be more overwhelming than his albums, which pluck an impressive variety of moods from his torn vocal cords. It might’ve helped if the half-hour of stage banter that’s been confined to a second disc had instead been spread throughout the performance (though Waits’s wandering stories and shuck-and-jive routines are plenty entertaining on their own). Newcomers looking for an overview of everything Waits is capable of might be better served by 2006’s sprawling Orphans, but for hardcore Waits fans, the showmanship on Glitter and Doom is pure manna.
Monday, November 23, 2009
The Consumption: Nov. 23
Even from a wheelchair, Chesnutt commands the stage. Actually, that feels like the wrong word -- he somehow seems too sweet to command anything, mostly thanks to his banter (asking where the cowboys were and then scolding the crowd for turning against their own when they laughed, reminiscing about staring at Emmylou Harris's behind when he played the Calgary Folk Music Festival). But musically, the Vic Chesnutt Band is a powerhouse. The members of A Silver Mt. Zion have restraint down to a science, refusing to add an extraneous note. Then, all hell breaks loose, with Chesnutt's distorted acoustic guitar trading blows with Guy Picciotto's electric, which occasionally sounds like a wounded animal. Then another slow, bluesy number, coasting on an easy groove, Chesnutt chatting with the crowd between verses. Both extremes seem entirely unforced.
Chesnutt's voice has bluesman confidence and world-weariness, but he's not afraid to wink. He dedicates one song to "The often-late Vic Chesnutt." In the encore, he plays a song from his first album, just him and his guitar. The chorus: "I am not a victim. I am intelligent. I am not a victim. I am an athiest." It's the closest thing he gets to an anthem, powerful even without the muscle of Zion and Picciotto.
The Consumption: Nov 19-22
Man... I need to stay on top of this.
THEATRE: TheatreJunction – The Country: Martin Crimp’s script is a tongue-twister, looping back on itself, interrupting itself, repeating phrases and traveling on hairpin tangents. As delivered by Mark Lawes and Fiona Byrne, though, it’s not much more than two actors getting through their lines as best they can without playing off each other in the slightest. Things improve when Raphaele Thiriet appears, adding casual charm, flightiness and a decent emotional range to the proceedings, but that just makes Lawes’s and Byrne’s performances seem all the more stuck up (though, to be fair, Lawes and Byrne are both far better in the second act than the first, which makes me suspect Chris Abraham’s direction is to blame). The tension and twists in the script still make it worthwhile on the whole, but this feels like a wasted opportunity.
FILM: Chaturanga – Four Chapters: A few technical issues aside, this adaptation of Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s novella has a good deal of appeal. As a bit of a skeptic, the opening two acts struck me the most, with the wise Uncle devoting himself to humanitarianism despite the religious and cultural pressures around him. The extended sequence where Uncle’s followers stay with a guru dragged, especially as the film made no attempt to portray the guru as anything but a sham, but still provided some interesting meditations on the balance between faith and reason. A little overly episodic on the whole, though.
FILM: Kanchivaram – A Communist Confession: In my top two at the Hidden Gems fest. The story of a man who sacrifices everything to provide his daughter with a silk sari, the film has elements of tragedy, but as the opening sequence amply shows, it has an energy and style that can only be attributed to the director’s past in Bollywood. Blends the political with the personal, encompassing everything from revolutionary fervor to familial obligation with the same confident hand.
GAME: The New Super Mario Bros Wii: Only tried this one briefly… It actually reminds me a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, in that it captures the classic feel of earlier series entries, and works as both a competitive and cooperative game. On early levels at least (World 3, I think), the level design is more than balanced enough to handle multiple players without feeling overly crowded, and even repeated deaths weren’t particularly frustrating, though this might change once the levels get more technically demanding. Still, seeing Mario return to side-scrolling glory on a console is more than just a nostalgic joy, it’s an incentive to revisit all of the classic NES and Super NES versions.
THEATRE: TheatreJunction – The Country: Martin Crimp’s script is a tongue-twister, looping back on itself, interrupting itself, repeating phrases and traveling on hairpin tangents. As delivered by Mark Lawes and Fiona Byrne, though, it’s not much more than two actors getting through their lines as best they can without playing off each other in the slightest. Things improve when Raphaele Thiriet appears, adding casual charm, flightiness and a decent emotional range to the proceedings, but that just makes Lawes’s and Byrne’s performances seem all the more stuck up (though, to be fair, Lawes and Byrne are both far better in the second act than the first, which makes me suspect Chris Abraham’s direction is to blame). The tension and twists in the script still make it worthwhile on the whole, but this feels like a wasted opportunity.
FILM: Chaturanga – Four Chapters: A few technical issues aside, this adaptation of Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s novella has a good deal of appeal. As a bit of a skeptic, the opening two acts struck me the most, with the wise Uncle devoting himself to humanitarianism despite the religious and cultural pressures around him. The extended sequence where Uncle’s followers stay with a guru dragged, especially as the film made no attempt to portray the guru as anything but a sham, but still provided some interesting meditations on the balance between faith and reason. A little overly episodic on the whole, though.
FILM: Kanchivaram – A Communist Confession: In my top two at the Hidden Gems fest. The story of a man who sacrifices everything to provide his daughter with a silk sari, the film has elements of tragedy, but as the opening sequence amply shows, it has an energy and style that can only be attributed to the director’s past in Bollywood. Blends the political with the personal, encompassing everything from revolutionary fervor to familial obligation with the same confident hand.
GAME: The New Super Mario Bros Wii: Only tried this one briefly… It actually reminds me a lot of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures, in that it captures the classic feel of earlier series entries, and works as both a competitive and cooperative game. On early levels at least (World 3, I think), the level design is more than balanced enough to handle multiple players without feeling overly crowded, and even repeated deaths weren’t particularly frustrating, though this might change once the levels get more technically demanding. Still, seeing Mario return to side-scrolling glory on a console is more than just a nostalgic joy, it’s an incentive to revisit all of the classic NES and Super NES versions.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The Consumption: Nov. 19-ish
FILM: The Third Man: First and foremost, the zither score is fantastic. I want it as a ringtone, which is not something that usually occurs to me, because I have never used a tone other than chimes. But the mood that it sets is so... off. The music is upbeat but not exactly happy. It's propulsive but not hugely energetic. It's just... singular seems like a good word for it.
Aside from that, it's gorgeous. Black and white always looks better, but the old Vienna setting is beautiful and the actual photography is beautiful, vivid... they supposedly hosed down the roads to make the cobblestones more reflective, to give an idea of the amount of effort they put in. And as for the actual film, it's classic noir, with an effortlessly good turn by Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the dead man who drives all the film's action. Understandably classic.
VINYL: The Turtles - Happy Together Again: "Happy Together" is the song that most people know, and "Elenore" is the reason I bought it, but I was still surprised at how good the rest of this two-disc collection is (yes, yes, I'm overwhelmingly positive in this blog, but why would I go out of my way to consume crappy things?). I'd known that the two main Turtles went on to back up T. Rex and work with Zappa, but that was always an oddity to me. Listening to this, it now makes more sense. The songs are pure pop (they were reliable hitmakers) but the chords are a lot more interesting than you'd think. Even in "Happy Together," if you listen to the lead guitar, there's more going on than you likely remember.
CD: Tom Waits - Glitter and Doom Live: Last time Waits went live, it was on the stone classic Big Time, which brought even more bark to tunes like "16 Shells from a 30.06." But that was pre-Bone Machine, pre-Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money... all of which leaves a lot of room for Glitter and Doom to play. On the plus side, he goes as far back as Rain Dogs and touches on some tracks from most of the albums up to Real Gone and Orphans (though Alice and Blood Money are conspicuously absent) but the trouble is, he's stuck solely in gruff-man vocal mode. Which means "Dirt in the Ground" doesn't have the falsetto that made the original so haunting, for example, and the whole thing starts to wear a bit thin by the end. Seeing it live would've been something, as the stage experience is supposedly quite elabourate, but it's missing something here. A second disc of rambling storytelling and banter is almost more entertaining, somehow, and makes a great addition.
Aside from that, it's gorgeous. Black and white always looks better, but the old Vienna setting is beautiful and the actual photography is beautiful, vivid... they supposedly hosed down the roads to make the cobblestones more reflective, to give an idea of the amount of effort they put in. And as for the actual film, it's classic noir, with an effortlessly good turn by Orson Welles as Harry Lime, the dead man who drives all the film's action. Understandably classic.
VINYL: The Turtles - Happy Together Again: "Happy Together" is the song that most people know, and "Elenore" is the reason I bought it, but I was still surprised at how good the rest of this two-disc collection is (yes, yes, I'm overwhelmingly positive in this blog, but why would I go out of my way to consume crappy things?). I'd known that the two main Turtles went on to back up T. Rex and work with Zappa, but that was always an oddity to me. Listening to this, it now makes more sense. The songs are pure pop (they were reliable hitmakers) but the chords are a lot more interesting than you'd think. Even in "Happy Together," if you listen to the lead guitar, there's more going on than you likely remember.
CD: Tom Waits - Glitter and Doom Live: Last time Waits went live, it was on the stone classic Big Time, which brought even more bark to tunes like "16 Shells from a 30.06." But that was pre-Bone Machine, pre-Mule Variations, Alice, Blood Money... all of which leaves a lot of room for Glitter and Doom to play. On the plus side, he goes as far back as Rain Dogs and touches on some tracks from most of the albums up to Real Gone and Orphans (though Alice and Blood Money are conspicuously absent) but the trouble is, he's stuck solely in gruff-man vocal mode. Which means "Dirt in the Ground" doesn't have the falsetto that made the original so haunting, for example, and the whole thing starts to wear a bit thin by the end. Seeing it live would've been something, as the stage experience is supposedly quite elabourate, but it's missing something here. A second disc of rambling storytelling and banter is almost more entertaining, somehow, and makes a great addition.
Monday, November 16, 2009
The Consumption: Nov. 15 and 16
Maybe someday I should start adding images into these, but for now, I just don't particularly care.
FILM: Gone With the Wind: For some reason, I've long been apprehensive about this one. It's always portrayed as the uber-romance, a heartbreaking epic of southern chivalry, damsels swooning and "yessum, mastuh" servants, which didn't much entice me. There's some accuracy to that, but I don't know that I would even categorize it as a love story. It's more a character study of Scarlet O'Hara, a mostly awful person with moments of true humanity. She's manipulative, cold, calculating, seemingly incapable of real love... and a whole lot more interesting than the belles that surround her. Clark Gable is perfect throughout -- he has an inhumanly perfect smirk, and while his character is nearly as self-centred as ol' Scarlet, he's both more honest about it and more prone to demonstrating the soul beneath the persona. Better than I expected, mostly because it's more cynical than I expected. Anyone who talks about classics being overly saccharine just hasn't watched them; mainstream movies these days are far more emotionally straightforward.
FILM: Zero Bridge: Halfway through the Indian movies now, and this one's my favourite of the three by a good margin. That could just be me showing a cultural bias -- the minimal production and low-key performances are a lot closer to North American indie filmmaking than the other two have been. Still, Mohamad Imran Tapa is great as the bright but self-centred main character, who verges on a life of crime because the world offered by his illiterate uncle (played superbly by Ali Mohammad Dar), and Taniya Khan is just plain gorgeous as the sort-of love interest. Has the same kind of documentary feel as films like L'Enfant and Police, Adjective... this one'll be hard to top.
FILM: Gone With the Wind: For some reason, I've long been apprehensive about this one. It's always portrayed as the uber-romance, a heartbreaking epic of southern chivalry, damsels swooning and "yessum, mastuh" servants, which didn't much entice me. There's some accuracy to that, but I don't know that I would even categorize it as a love story. It's more a character study of Scarlet O'Hara, a mostly awful person with moments of true humanity. She's manipulative, cold, calculating, seemingly incapable of real love... and a whole lot more interesting than the belles that surround her. Clark Gable is perfect throughout -- he has an inhumanly perfect smirk, and while his character is nearly as self-centred as ol' Scarlet, he's both more honest about it and more prone to demonstrating the soul beneath the persona. Better than I expected, mostly because it's more cynical than I expected. Anyone who talks about classics being overly saccharine just hasn't watched them; mainstream movies these days are far more emotionally straightforward.
FILM: Zero Bridge: Halfway through the Indian movies now, and this one's my favourite of the three by a good margin. That could just be me showing a cultural bias -- the minimal production and low-key performances are a lot closer to North American indie filmmaking than the other two have been. Still, Mohamad Imran Tapa is great as the bright but self-centred main character, who verges on a life of crime because the world offered by his illiterate uncle (played superbly by Ali Mohammad Dar), and Taniya Khan is just plain gorgeous as the sort-of love interest. Has the same kind of documentary feel as films like L'Enfant and Police, Adjective... this one'll be hard to top.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
The Consumption: Nov. 14
EVENT: 24th Annual Gemini Awards: Being in the press room was possibly even less exciting than watching the broadcast on TV. A few decent tidbits (learning that an award was actually turned down and packed away, finding out that they cut a joke about torture in Syria at the last second) and good/geeky to ask Veronica Mars' dad how to kill a guy with two tea bags and some wax paper, but too many back-stage press scrums, not enough glitz and glamour of Canadian television.
But, those two ladies from Corner Gas were kind of hot.
CONCERT: DINOSAUR JR: There's no denying that a lot of their songs sound the same (they all boil down to volume + guitar wank), but there's also no denying that the band truly delivered. Mascis can rip out solos with the best of them, but the real key seems to be Lou Barlow, who is a fucking monster on the bass (and no slouch on the vocals, either). My ears are still ringing. As long as it stops within a day or so, I will consider this worthwhile.
But, those two ladies from Corner Gas were kind of hot.
CONCERT: DINOSAUR JR: There's no denying that a lot of their songs sound the same (they all boil down to volume + guitar wank), but there's also no denying that the band truly delivered. Mascis can rip out solos with the best of them, but the real key seems to be Lou Barlow, who is a fucking monster on the bass (and no slouch on the vocals, either). My ears are still ringing. As long as it stops within a day or so, I will consider this worthwhile.
Friday, November 13, 2009
Interview: Ron James, set to host the Geminis
Last year’s Geminis drew 62,000 people, which is less than a tenth of what your average CBC special brings in. Why are you doing this?
[Laughs] Listen man, just jump right in, that’s what I say. Look, I could always use another 62,000 viewers, too, you know. I’m doing it because I had a riot doing it last year at the non-broadcast night, I did the news events. I’m in the industry, I’ve got my own series on CBC now, and after last year, they asked me if I’d commit. I said sure, sounds like fun. The same company that produces my television show is producing the Geminis, and I knew I’d be right in my comfort zone.
I love the west, and when I heard it was going to be open to the public, I thought, sweet, it’s not going to be such a corporate gig, you know? I could push the envelope a bit.
Was it important for you to have the live audience involved?
Yeah, it was definitely an encouraging thing to hear. It loosens the night up and takes it out of the corporate realm, and allows the material to be not so much inside [industry], but embrace a broader perspective. I can talk about Calgary, I can talk about the West. I’ve toured there extensively over the last 10 years, I’ve worked from Lethbridge to the oil patch, and I think that now the West is playing a crucial role in the national zeitgeist, and, you know, why not embrace that when we’re talking about Canadian culture as well?
Are you going to be tailoring the show more towards the west, or since it’s a national broadcast, is it a national focus?
I’m going to be touching down on all sorts of spots. I’ll touch down on TV, touch down on the West itself, touch down on the nation, H1N1, you know, whatever hot button points are in the news. You have to go by instinct, too. If you’re touring — I’m in the middle of a tour of Atlantic Canada, so there’s some material that I was going to play universally that I’ll be playing there, that I’ve been honing on the road. There’s some material that I’ve played out West that’s never been on TV that I’ll be utilizing, and stuff the writers have come up with that pertains directly to TV.
When you’re doing stand-up, how is that different from sketch TV and this kind of live broadcast?
Well, absolutely. It’s a customized gig, isn’t it? It’s not just me winding the engine out for two hours, with a paying audience who paid $50 to see my show. I can say what I want to say there, as long as I don’t lose the room. But, you know, the same rules apply: Get laughs or get off. After 16 years in the trenches of Canadian comedy, I like to think that I’ve learned a few things about how to work a room. The same rules apply, it’s just that you have to tailor them a little differently for the arena you’ve found yourself in.
You seem to be having a better go of it now, but you’ve had some bitter experiences in the television industry —
Tell me, who hasn’t after 30 years in. How old are you?
I’m 26.
Twenty-six. You spend 30 years in the newspaper business, you tell me you haven’t had a bitter experience. Here’s the thing. Every hammer a carpenter picks up, he doesn’t build a mansion. You’ve got to learn. And if you’re referring to the bitter experience of Blackfly, that was two years that I was on, and it was a validation of the imagination, and I learned a great deal. The most important thing I learned doing that show was that you’ve got to surround yourself with great people who are taking their ship in the same direction, and that’s what I have with this particular series I’m doing now, which is why we got 811,000 viewers last Friday night. You work just as hard to get a show that receives mediocre reviews as you do to get one that receives stellar reviews and numbers. And I enjoyed the cast I worked with on that series, I enjoyed the struggle of the work. But you’ve got to have writers and you’ve got to have a team of writers who believe in your funny. And that’s what I have with the series The Ron James Show. I’ve got (Gerry Campbell), who honed his chops — as executive producer and head writer — honed his chops in Los Angeles for 10 years writing for Mad TV, Jeff Foxworthy, Roseanne, you name it. And I have (Liv Harvey), the executive producer who’s produced my last five national specials, and I’ve got my love of the work, which is a marriage of stand-up and sketch. I get to perform with people who come to play, and so, you learn from experiences that may not necessarily win you accolades. Your teachers come in many forms.
Some notable exceptions like your specials, Corner Gas and This Hour has 22 Minutes aside, it seems like Canadian television has a hard time capturing the national imagination. What do you think is the biggest source of difficulty for Canadians to capture Canadian audiences?
That’s a good question, man. Well, what do you mean capture Canadian audiences — are you talking in terms of numbers or are you talking in terms of pure enjoyment?
I’m talking in terms of numbers, because enjoyment is a much trickier thing to measure, really.
Well, when your budget for a show each week, like Mad Men, is $15 million, you’re gonna have production values. And you’ve got American spin, you’ve got the hype, you’ve got the power of an empire that’s got 177 military bases around the world, you know: Better start watching our shows or we’ll invade you.
That’s a cheap shot, but, I don’t know. I don’t pretend to be an authority on the semantics of the differences between Canadian and American TV. I just know that when Canadians find something that appeals to them, they’ll watch. I know that when I started in standup comedy, too, people said that, ‘Oh, you’ve got to lose all that material if you want to be successful in the States.’ Well, I put three years down in Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, and when I came home, I wanted to make it work here. And I came to learn that 2,000 people laughing in a snowstorm in Edmonton sounds exactly the same as 2,000 people laughing in Los Angeles where it’s warm.
When stories reflect the Canadian zeitgeist, and when they reflect and embrace the iconography and mythology of people and place, and try to figure out what it is that makes us tick, Canadians will watch. Look at the success of Corner Gas. And they will feel represented. Whether or not the nominating committee of the Gemini Awards feels the same, that’s a different issue altogether.
That is another thing — last year, Corner Gas, despite it being it’s last year, was shut out. When people see something like that, does that give them a reason to look away from the awards show, if they don’t see it reflecting what they’re actually interested in?
Well, I think it’s something that definitely the Academy has to begin to look at, period. I mean, the fact that Corner Gas was shut out last year by Cocked and Loaded that nobody watched lends one to assume that something’s rotten in Denmark, and I just can’t understand it. It just perplexes me — and it perplexes everybody in the industry. Perhaps I’m speaking out of turn by this, but — what odds, it’s what I do for a living — but I think that the consistency of that show and the seamlessness of the cast and its standards, the fact they were overlooked can only be explained by internal jealousies. You know? That’s all. And I’d like to see more consistency from that area in the comedic categories, absolutely. We’re always eating at the little table, and then when you finally do have a great show, for some reason or another, it’s overlooked. It’s almost that old Canadian adage, ‘Oh, they’re successful, we want to make sure that they don’t get a big head, so we’re not going to nominate them.
But the country knows, and Brent knows, and the people who created that show know how great it was. And it is. Period.
You do seem to see a lot of the time that “Gemini nominee” and “recently cancelled show” go hand in hand.
Once again, I can only comment on things that affect me and that I know about, and I don’t know about those semantics of why they’re cancelled and why they’re nominated and things. I mean, I’m sure that’s network decisions or a myriad number of decisions. I know it takes an awful long time to line your planets up and to have a successful show, there’s numerous elements of the show that go in to make it successful. Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan.
In all these awards shows, there’s people that are overlooked. It happens at the Academy Awards, you know, Dr. Strangelove loses out to My Fair Lady or whatever it was, and there’s glaring omissions, and sometimes that’s bound to happen. But I think that for the most part, I’m pleased with the way things are looking this year for Canadian television. Flashpoint is sold to, how many, 19 countries around the world? That’s outstanding! That’s the universality of the storytelling, and that’s really important.
In your view, what would be the key thing to change to get a wider audience for the Geminis — aside from having it on basic cable this year and not on specialty cable like it was last year.
Oh, is that what it was? I was on tour, I didn’t see it. I think they’re on the right track with opening it up to the public and not keeping it insular. The more that you, why should the public be excluded from an awards show and seeing it, when it’s the public who feeds us. You know, it’s the public who pays our bills. I mean, those are the ones who are watching, so bring ’em in. We’re all one big happy family.
That’s my motto, anyway. I’m just going to approach the gig with the same passion I bring to my live show. If the ushers aren’t wiping the seats down, I haven’t done my job.
One last thing — I noticed that one of the nominees for best host of a variety show this year is Jason Priestly for hosting last year’s awards.
[Laughs] Oh, is he?
Do you think you’re a shoo-in for next year’s nomination?
Oh, goes without saying, I can’t wait. I’m going to buy a winery like Jason did, too, after next year.
The Consumption - Nov 13
FILM: 2012: I was expecting the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, and on that level at least, director Roland Emmerich delivers. 2012 basically just takes scenes from every apocalypse flick ever made (a bit of Deep Impact here, some Volcano there, even some Titanic for good measure) and strings them together with the flimsiest pseudoscience and most saccharine dialogue that Emmerich and go-writer Harald Kloser could half-ass together. It's fairly hilarious, even with Woody Harrelson mugging it up as a parody of his eco-activist persona, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is solid (and stolid) throughout. Not a good movie by any stretch, but I've spent 2 1/2 hours on worse things before.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
The consumption: Nov 12
Alright, "Daily" is probably going to be stretching things, but I'll keep this as regular as I can. I haven't really taken in all that much in the last four days anyway, but let's keep this going:
CONCERT: No More Shapes w/Beneath These Idle Tides and Free Nude Celebs: Weeds Cafe isn't my favourite venue in town, but the cramped quarters really did help make this one feel special — 60 people in the back room of a coffee shop listening to avane-garde noise can't help but warm your heart. Shapes and Tides collaborated for the opening set, and the warm drones of the latter provided a sturdy foundation for the more freeform explorations of the former. BTIT's solo set started off familiarly enough, with a simple melodic line filtered through the most powerful reverb this side of... um... a really large room, but actual, clearly defined picking patterns actually emerged at the end — a welcome development. The real suprise, though, was Azeda Booth frontman Jordan Hossack's Free Nude Celebs set. Dressed in hippie garb that would've made Ken Kesey blush in 1967, the singer abandoned the falsetto and electronics that have served him well in favour of an erratically strummed acoustic guitar. The strumming patterns were steady enough to provide momentum, but off-kilter enough to keep things on edge. Lyrics were a bizarre mix of poetry, self-confession and humour, all delivered with an almost superhuman transparency — Hossack seems completely incapable of artifice. He's a thoroughly weird dude, and that can be off-putting, but there's a real brilliance behind each of his bizarre tunes.
CD: Dr. Dre - The Chronic: Yes, I should have heard this album a decade ago... Seventeen years of mainstream gangsta posturing have dulled the album's danger, but that only makes it easier to appreciate the actual music on the disc. Dre's production is impeccably funky, but I'm more impressed with his vocal delivery, ghost-written or not. It doesn't blow me away technically, but there's a toughness that just isn't there in the Eminem cameos that introduced my high school self to Dre. Plus, Snoop actually seems more than half-conscious on his verses, which is a plus.
CONCERT: No More Shapes w/Beneath These Idle Tides and Free Nude Celebs: Weeds Cafe isn't my favourite venue in town, but the cramped quarters really did help make this one feel special — 60 people in the back room of a coffee shop listening to avane-garde noise can't help but warm your heart. Shapes and Tides collaborated for the opening set, and the warm drones of the latter provided a sturdy foundation for the more freeform explorations of the former. BTIT's solo set started off familiarly enough, with a simple melodic line filtered through the most powerful reverb this side of... um... a really large room, but actual, clearly defined picking patterns actually emerged at the end — a welcome development. The real suprise, though, was Azeda Booth frontman Jordan Hossack's Free Nude Celebs set. Dressed in hippie garb that would've made Ken Kesey blush in 1967, the singer abandoned the falsetto and electronics that have served him well in favour of an erratically strummed acoustic guitar. The strumming patterns were steady enough to provide momentum, but off-kilter enough to keep things on edge. Lyrics were a bizarre mix of poetry, self-confession and humour, all delivered with an almost superhuman transparency — Hossack seems completely incapable of artifice. He's a thoroughly weird dude, and that can be off-putting, but there's a real brilliance behind each of his bizarre tunes.
CD: Dr. Dre - The Chronic: Yes, I should have heard this album a decade ago... Seventeen years of mainstream gangsta posturing have dulled the album's danger, but that only makes it easier to appreciate the actual music on the disc. Dre's production is impeccably funky, but I'm more impressed with his vocal delivery, ghost-written or not. It doesn't blow me away technically, but there's a toughness that just isn't there in the Eminem cameos that introduced my high school self to Dre. Plus, Snoop actually seems more than half-conscious on his verses, which is a plus.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Daily Consumption: Nov. 8
FILM: Parallel Folds: Second of the Indian movies I'm judging. Slightly unfair, because a fair number of scenes are quite overexposed, which makes the subtitles completely illegible for stretches, but I'm pretty sure I followed the whole thing. I'm also pretty sure it's overly melodramatic, and whatever insight it has into the idea of dignified/voluntary death are overwhelmed by some soap-opera calibre characterizations. Definitely won't be my pick.
VINYL: Them - Featuring Van Morrison: A little baffled by the exclusion of "Baby Please Don't Go," but otherwise this is extremely worthwhile. Less raunchy garage a la "Gloria," more emphasis on the R&B jams, which is a good trade. Morrison occasionally sounds more like Jagger than Mick ever did, and the band's tighter than the Stones ever were. Plus, I'm pretty sure this album's the source of Beck's samples on "Devil's Haircut" and "Jackass," which is neat.
VINYL: Them - Featuring Van Morrison: A little baffled by the exclusion of "Baby Please Don't Go," but otherwise this is extremely worthwhile. Less raunchy garage a la "Gloria," more emphasis on the R&B jams, which is a good trade. Morrison occasionally sounds more like Jagger than Mick ever did, and the band's tighter than the Stones ever were. Plus, I'm pretty sure this album's the source of Beck's samples on "Devil's Haircut" and "Jackass," which is neat.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Daily consumption: Nov. 7
COMEDY: Louis CK: His second set of the day, and he did seem a bit worn down, but that didn't particularly detract. Aside from seeming to drop one anecdote, everything was pretty much spot on, with the usual knack for finding the right vulgarity for any situation and the right mix of insight and depression. It's odd: he mostly does jokes about kids and there was a good chunk of airline humour at the start, but he makes it all work.
CD: Maxwell - Black Summer's Night: God, it's good to hear a genuine horn section again. Neo soul with a bit of Curtis Mayfield falsetto, but when he kicks into the regular register, it hits the groove much harder. Solid stuff.
FILM: NFB Shorts: I'll lump these all together for brevity's sake. Cordell Barker's Runaway just has me more confused about his career -- how has he only made 3 shorts in 21 years? Great bit of slapstick with not-so-subtle social commentary. Also of note: Spare Change, which moves from a conversation between two homeless people (probably taken from late animator Ryan Larkin's real experience) to an odd, impressionistic musical number; How People Got Fire, more for the gorgeous pencil-sketched portions than the other, rotoscope-looking bits; and Land of the Heads, a nicely macabre little ditty about a vampire-thing, his picky wife and the innocent girls whose heads they steal.
FILM: Damned Rain: First of four films I have to watch for the Hidden Gems film fest I'm judging. The tone is odd, focussing on a struggling farmer and his wife, who is worried that he'll commit suicide. I'm still not sure if her constant monitoring of him is supposed to be funny or worrying (or both), and the story arc is downright depressing, but well told. The musical interludes feel like they're there mostly out of deference to Bollywood tradition (there's no song and dance, but the lyrics read like they exist solely to reinforce the mood), which drags it down a little.
CD: Maxwell - Black Summer's Night: God, it's good to hear a genuine horn section again. Neo soul with a bit of Curtis Mayfield falsetto, but when he kicks into the regular register, it hits the groove much harder. Solid stuff.
FILM: NFB Shorts: I'll lump these all together for brevity's sake. Cordell Barker's Runaway just has me more confused about his career -- how has he only made 3 shorts in 21 years? Great bit of slapstick with not-so-subtle social commentary. Also of note: Spare Change, which moves from a conversation between two homeless people (probably taken from late animator Ryan Larkin's real experience) to an odd, impressionistic musical number; How People Got Fire, more for the gorgeous pencil-sketched portions than the other, rotoscope-looking bits; and Land of the Heads, a nicely macabre little ditty about a vampire-thing, his picky wife and the innocent girls whose heads they steal.
FILM: Damned Rain: First of four films I have to watch for the Hidden Gems film fest I'm judging. The tone is odd, focussing on a struggling farmer and his wife, who is worried that he'll commit suicide. I'm still not sure if her constant monitoring of him is supposed to be funny or worrying (or both), and the story arc is downright depressing, but well told. The musical interludes feel like they're there mostly out of deference to Bollywood tradition (there's no song and dance, but the lyrics read like they exist solely to reinforce the mood), which drags it down a little.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Daily Consumption: More Nov. 5
CONCERT: Clea Anaïs w/Deadhorse: Nice to see the Marquee Room packed on a Thursday night; Clea's idea to give away her new EP for free was also pretty brilliant. The sound didn't really do justice to her cello-guitar-drums sound, as the loop peddles tended to get muddy, but it was clear enough that her and Brock Geiger make a great musical pair. Too bad she didn't get her dad up to sing a song with her.
I was expecting a bit more from Deadhorse. They've got the potential to be a great party band, but at the moment, their covers are more confident and energetic than any of their originals, which is surprising for a band that has three members of the Consonant C. But those covers did show that the band has a lot of potential, and they know how to work a crowd. Maybe Calgary will get a solid party band yet.
I was expecting a bit more from Deadhorse. They've got the potential to be a great party band, but at the moment, their covers are more confident and energetic than any of their originals, which is surprising for a band that has three members of the Consonant C. But those covers did show that the band has a lot of potential, and they know how to work a crowd. Maybe Calgary will get a solid party band yet.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Daily Consumption: Nov. 5
No entry for the 4th, because I didn't actually manage to listen to a single new record or watch a new movie. Hooray for days off.
FILM: Pirate Radio: The British version was criticized for its length, but I doubt that'll be the main issue with the new, 20-minute-shorter cut. It's a heck of a fun film and the soundtrack is absolutely killer. Chief issues: The subplot with Kenneth Branagh's government official trying to shut down the radio never seems to connect with anything that happens on the boat, and too much of the movie is reaction shots of radio listeners grooving out. Also, the fact that very, very little of the movie reflects the reality of pirate radio at the time is a bummer — it colours the whole thing as yet another slab of boomer mythmaking.
CD: Blue Rodeo - The Things We Left Behind: Consistent but also depressing. The lead track has a chorus about how sometimes it's better to be dead inside, and while the rest doesn't sink that low, there's a melancholy aura over the whole thing. It's also a very competent album, though — BR could probably put out songs like this in their sleep, but it doesn't feel tossed off, either. I've never paid much attention to them, but a few tracks have just the right Beatles-with-twang sound that I might have to give it another spin.
CD: Betty Davis - Nasty Gal and Is It Love or Desire: Pair of reissues on Light in the Attic records of Davis's supremely funky mid-70s output. Slap bass, gruff vocals, attitude like crazy. I can't think of what to say other than Supremely Funky.
CD: On Fillmore: Extended Vacation: Have to admit, I wasn't expecting quite so many animal sounds on a Dead Oceans release. In the office, at least, the nature sounds only distract from what would otherwise be a decent slab of ambiance. Didn't finish it.
FILM: Pirate Radio: The British version was criticized for its length, but I doubt that'll be the main issue with the new, 20-minute-shorter cut. It's a heck of a fun film and the soundtrack is absolutely killer. Chief issues: The subplot with Kenneth Branagh's government official trying to shut down the radio never seems to connect with anything that happens on the boat, and too much of the movie is reaction shots of radio listeners grooving out. Also, the fact that very, very little of the movie reflects the reality of pirate radio at the time is a bummer — it colours the whole thing as yet another slab of boomer mythmaking.
CD: Blue Rodeo - The Things We Left Behind: Consistent but also depressing. The lead track has a chorus about how sometimes it's better to be dead inside, and while the rest doesn't sink that low, there's a melancholy aura over the whole thing. It's also a very competent album, though — BR could probably put out songs like this in their sleep, but it doesn't feel tossed off, either. I've never paid much attention to them, but a few tracks have just the right Beatles-with-twang sound that I might have to give it another spin.
CD: Betty Davis - Nasty Gal and Is It Love or Desire: Pair of reissues on Light in the Attic records of Davis's supremely funky mid-70s output. Slap bass, gruff vocals, attitude like crazy. I can't think of what to say other than Supremely Funky.
CD: On Fillmore: Extended Vacation: Have to admit, I wasn't expecting quite so many animal sounds on a Dead Oceans release. In the office, at least, the nature sounds only distract from what would otherwise be a decent slab of ambiance. Didn't finish it.
Old and Notable: Reissues and live sounds from times gone by
Leonard Cohen
Live at the Isle of Wight 1970
Sony Legacy
Age has been kind to Cohen, and this year’s Live in London (recorded in 2008) contained versions of 40-year-old songs as definitive as any in Cohen’s catalogue. Isle of Wight is more reflective of the singer-songwriter’s folk roots (there’s no wailing saxophone in “Bird on the Wire,” for example), and Cohen’s serene stage presence is already firmly entrenched, but the performance feels monotone compared to the current, more elaborate arrangements. DVD footage directed by Murray Lerner gives context through recent interviews with Cohen’s Wight contemporaries, but the abridged track list makes the CD the more essential component.
Elvis Costello
Live at the El Mocambo
Universal
Costello was still an angry young man when this set was recorded in 1978 at Toronto’s El Mocambo club. Songs from My Aim is True sound significantly tougher here thanks to the presence of Costello’s new backing band The Attractions (replacing Clover, who would go on to join Huey Lewis’s News), while “Radio, Radio” and “Pump It Up” from the not-yet-released This Year’s Model are appropriately splenetic. If only he still sounded this passionate today.
Sunny Day Real Estate
Diary & LP2
Sub Pop
The 10th anniversary of the pioneering emo outfit’s debut (and an upcoming reunion tour) is all the excuse Sub Pop needs to reissue Sunny Day Real Estate’s first two albums. Mild remastering and scant bonus material don’t justify repurchasing either disc, but for newcomers, these handsome editions are a perfect way to hear a much-maligned genre in its infancy. Singer Jeremy Enigk’s vocals define post-adolescent angst, while the rhythm section went on to join fellow Seattle outfit Foo Fighters in time for The Color and the Shape.
Various Artists
Tumbélé!: Biguine, Afro & Latin Sounds from the French Caribbean, 1963-74
Soundway
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Daily consumption: More Nov. 3
FILM: The 400 Blows: Aside from accidentally asking for a ticket to The 200 Blows (lowered expectations, maybe?), this one went fairly well. A fantastic movie, although it's hard for me to see exactly what was so revolutionary about it. I assume it's just that it offers a realistic depiction of youth and juvenile delinquency that doesn't reduce the world to "rotten kids are rotten." Soundtrack was oddly joyful for such a downbeat film.
CD: The Dutchess & The Duke - Sunset/Sunrise: The first Dutchess & the Duke album hit me hard as a great, Stones-y acoustic pop album, but over time the tunes started to grate on me. I doubt that this one'll run into the same problem — the songs are considerably more laid back and hookless; there's hardly a rough surface to grip, let alone grate. Dull, in other words.
CD: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster: Herky-jerky rhythms, overt sexuality and catchy tunes. Exactly what modern rock should be. I have a feeling this will be getting more than a few spins.
CD: The Dutchess & The Duke - Sunset/Sunrise: The first Dutchess & the Duke album hit me hard as a great, Stones-y acoustic pop album, but over time the tunes started to grate on me. I doubt that this one'll run into the same problem — the songs are considerably more laid back and hookless; there's hardly a rough surface to grip, let alone grate. Dull, in other words.
CD: Thao and the Get Down Stay Down - Know Better Learn Faster: Herky-jerky rhythms, overt sexuality and catchy tunes. Exactly what modern rock should be. I have a feeling this will be getting more than a few spins.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Daily consumption: Nov. 2 and 3
I am going to attempt to make note of all of the movies I watch, CDs I listen to and so on for as long as I can keep up the habit. Likely, this will not last, but it seems worth a shot. Most of the CDs are on in the background while I work, so reviews are hardly authoritative. Also, only includes things that are new to me, unless it's particularly noteworthy.
Nov. 2:
CD: Clea Anais - Heartstrings: More chamber-poppy than expected, and the song by her dad certainly comes out of nowhere; production's a bit rough, but considering she's giving it away for free, it's hard to complain. And the songs themselves are fairly wonderful; looped cello, creative melodies. Surprised how much I dig it.
FILM: A Town Called Panic: Along with Hausu last week, one of the most random films I have ever seen. They stretch the shorts to feature length by letting the plot go wherever they want, which turns out to be the right approach. Scientists fighting mammoths, a house crushed by 50 million bricks; this is what more kids' movies should be like. Props to Belgian translators for using the phrase "No probs" twice.
Nov. 3:
CD: Le Loup - Family: Seems to lean closer to the first album than the live show, which is definitely a good thing. Reverb-soaked vocals and rising vocal melodies aren't as immediately grabbing the second time around, though, at least on first listen. Will have to give it another try sometime.
CD: Blockhead - The Music Scene: Smooth, diverse mix. Transition from the vocodors of Four Walls to the old-school soul of Pity Party's a good reminder of how useless auto-tune is for the most part. Whole thing feels like background music in the good sense of the term - something to throw on when the party's almost died and everyone's just chilling with the last of the wine.
Nov. 2:
CD: Clea Anais - Heartstrings: More chamber-poppy than expected, and the song by her dad certainly comes out of nowhere; production's a bit rough, but considering she's giving it away for free, it's hard to complain. And the songs themselves are fairly wonderful; looped cello, creative melodies. Surprised how much I dig it.
FILM: A Town Called Panic: Along with Hausu last week, one of the most random films I have ever seen. They stretch the shorts to feature length by letting the plot go wherever they want, which turns out to be the right approach. Scientists fighting mammoths, a house crushed by 50 million bricks; this is what more kids' movies should be like. Props to Belgian translators for using the phrase "No probs" twice.
Nov. 3:
CD: Le Loup - Family: Seems to lean closer to the first album than the live show, which is definitely a good thing. Reverb-soaked vocals and rising vocal melodies aren't as immediately grabbing the second time around, though, at least on first listen. Will have to give it another try sometime.
CD: Blockhead - The Music Scene: Smooth, diverse mix. Transition from the vocodors of Four Walls to the old-school soul of Pity Party's a good reminder of how useless auto-tune is for the most part. Whole thing feels like background music in the good sense of the term - something to throw on when the party's almost died and everyone's just chilling with the last of the wine.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The ultimate meet-cute: Pseudo-doc’s appeal depends on your tolerance of twee
Your appreciation for Paper Heart, a doc/mockumentary about love, will be closely tied to your appreciation for quirk. Co-star Michael Cera is probably the best barometer: If you find his awkward stammering irresistible, the movie will likely resonate. If the thought of the Arrested Development star wooing an even more awkward comedienne is anathema to you, Paper Heart will be, too.
The film walks the line between reality and scripted romance, alternating between talking-head interviews of actual couples reflecting on their romantic lives and scenes of the budding, (presumably) fictional relationship between indie comic Charlyne Yi and Cera. Yi also throws in some homemade paper-cutout animations to flesh things out, adding to the deluge of quirk.
Still, it’s not as overbearing as it might sound. Yi’s enthusiasm goes a long way towards selling the animations, and her and Cera actually possess enough sweet, fumbling chemistry to make their relationship plausible.
The documentary setting is both a blessing and a curse for the film, though. The real-life interviews add a grounded, unforced sweetness to the proceedings, which makes the handholding twee-ness of the scripted segments easier to take. On the other hand, those same segments only emphasize how planned the relationship between Yi and Cera is. Everything from their meeting to the inevitable conflict feels rote, like they’re included out of obligation to rom-coms past.
Meet the residents: The Banff Centre expands its embrace of indie rock
Arriving at The Banff Centre late on a Wednesday evening, the complex feels undeniably spooky. Due to a major construction project, the usually open expanses of the centre have become a series of pathways lined with construction fences in Halloween orange. A perfect setting for the October 31 concert that marks the conclusion of The Banff Centre’s second annual Indie Band Residency, maybe, but it’s hardly the warm, collaboration-friendly atmosphere I had expected.
All that changes when the sun comes up. It’s only the third day of the residency and already three of the four bands are palling around at the centre’s breakfast buffet, discussing their plans for the day. Toronto singer-songwriter Basia Bulat is getting ready to finish mixing a song she recorded the night before with guest engineer Steve Albini, who has manned the boards for acts like The Pixies, Nirvana and The Jesus Lizard, as well as Calgary’s Hot Little Rocket and The Cape May. The mixing was supposed to happen the night before, but there was trouble with the tape machine used for the recording — Albini is a purist when it comes to technology and the machine, borrowed by the Banff Centre from Calgary’s Audities Recording, is a bit fussy.
Meanwhile, Mark Hamilton and Foon Yap of Calgary’s Woodpigeon are talking with Chris Leitch and Colin Cowan of Vancouver power-poppers Analog Bell Service about how to best use their morning. Hamilton has recruited Leitch and Cowan to back him up on “An Entanglement of Weeds,” a sombre eight-minute ballad he’ll be recording with Albini later in the day. He and Yap want to buckle down and work a bit more, while Cowan says he can’t work without a steam session — another luxury the centre provides for its residents. He’s mostly joking, of course, though that doesn’t actually stop him from indulging in the sauna.
If that all sounds a bit, well, indulgent, it isn’t meant to be. As an institution devoted to creativity, The Banff Centre provides for its artists and other residents because it expects a lot of them, and the musicians recruited for the Indie Band Residency are no exception. The program, the brainchild of the Banff Centre’s director of music, Barry Schiffman, and the director of audio, Theresa Leonard, is a bit of a departure for the institution, which typically has focused on classical and jazz for its residencies.
“Historically at the Banff Centre, there have always been a lot of classical, contemporary and jazz musicians,” she says. “The only time we would bring in pop musicians would be through the audio [production] program, where we would need to offer training in all styles of music. So Barry was open to turning this into not just a band coming to record with us, but make it an integral part of what Banff does by including indie bands into the life and history of music programs at the Banff Centre.”
Since the program grew from the audio production side of the centre — a work-study program with an international reputation — it’s only natural that the Indie Band Residency has been able to attract world-calibre talent in only its second year. In addition to Albini, the residency also includes sessions with Howard Bilerman, a former member of Arcade Fire who runs the Hotel2Tango with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor; Husky Höskulds, an Icelandic engineer who has worked with the likes of Elvis Costello, Solomon Burke and Tom Waits; Claudio Vena, a conductor and composer renowned for the quality of his arrangements; and Graham Lessard, an engineer who was also with the program in its first year.
What this means for both the engineers and artists is access to some of the most talented professionals in the industry, and Woodpigeon’s afternoon recording session with Albini is proof of the value of that. He seems to know instinctively which mics to use and where to put them, and is more than happy to explain his choices to anyone who asks. For the most part, though, he works quietly, talking to the band only to find out exactly what they want out of the recording experience and to do the occasional bit of trouble-shooting. He’s relaxed and friendly, even outgoing when he’s off the clock — some of the engineers strike up a conversation about his penchant for wolf-related clothing — but when the tape is rolling, he’s strictly professional. In a matter of minutes he takes a rough mix of a performance that the band isn’t entirely satisfied with but has to use due to time constraints. He transforms it into a version that sounds almost like a studio master. It’s clear both the band and the other engineers are impressed.
By early evening, Woodpigeon has its song in the can, Analog Bell Service is ready to record its second track in three days, and all four bands (including Montreal’s The Witchies) are getting ready for a concert on the weekend. The program itself culminates in a performance on Halloween, but Leonard doesn’t think of that as an ending.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Film review: Unmistaken Child
Depending on your perspective, there are two separate storylines running through the documentary Unmistaken Child. If you believe in reincarnation, director Nati Baratz has captured the story of Buddhist monk Tenzin Zopa’s quest to find the newest corporeal form of his late master, Geshe Lama Konchog. He and other experts examine everything from astrological charts to the direction of smoke plumes at Lama Konchong’s funeral pyre to narrow the search, culminating in their finding and testing a child who seems to match every prediction.
If you don’t believe, though, the story turns from miraculous to tragic. Zopa is clearly lost after the departure of Lama Konchong, who he has served since the age of seven. He tells the camera how he isn’t used to making decisions for himself, how empty his life feels without his best friend and mentor. In this version, he’s searching not for his master but a surrogate, eventually convincing a family to give up their child so he can have his friend back.
Regardless of which storyline you believe to be true, Unmistaken Child makes for interesting viewing. Baratz follows the story with confidence and an eye for atmosphere. When he finds an emotional moment, he lets the camera linger and never once succumbs to the temptation to add his own commentary, an increasingly (and frustratingly) rare quality in a documentarian. Whether the moment is spiritual, like when the child is asked to choose among items that may have belonged to Lama Konchog, or more grounded, like the heart-wrenching scene when the child has his head shaved to become a monk despite his tears and protests, Baratz lets the images speak for themselves.
The one drawback to this approach is the way it keeps the viewer at an arms length from the proceedings. Certain aspects of the monks’ belief system remain unexplained and details like the amount of time that passes between events aren’t always easy to discern. Still, with Zopa at the film’s centre, these moments of frustration rarely last. The monk is clearly thoughtful, sincere and dedicated, which makes his journey an enjoyable one for skeptics and believers alike.
If you don’t believe, though, the story turns from miraculous to tragic. Zopa is clearly lost after the departure of Lama Konchong, who he has served since the age of seven. He tells the camera how he isn’t used to making decisions for himself, how empty his life feels without his best friend and mentor. In this version, he’s searching not for his master but a surrogate, eventually convincing a family to give up their child so he can have his friend back.
Regardless of which storyline you believe to be true, Unmistaken Child makes for interesting viewing. Baratz follows the story with confidence and an eye for atmosphere. When he finds an emotional moment, he lets the camera linger and never once succumbs to the temptation to add his own commentary, an increasingly (and frustratingly) rare quality in a documentarian. Whether the moment is spiritual, like when the child is asked to choose among items that may have belonged to Lama Konchog, or more grounded, like the heart-wrenching scene when the child has his head shaved to become a monk despite his tears and protests, Baratz lets the images speak for themselves.
The one drawback to this approach is the way it keeps the viewer at an arms length from the proceedings. Certain aspects of the monks’ belief system remain unexplained and details like the amount of time that passes between events aren’t always easy to discern. Still, with Zopa at the film’s centre, these moments of frustration rarely last. The monk is clearly thoughtful, sincere and dedicated, which makes his journey an enjoyable one for skeptics and believers alike.
Various Artists - Sweet Treats: Live Sessions from CJSW 90.9 FM
On CJSW, variety is the name of the game. So it’s no surprise that Sweet Treats: Live Sessions from CJSW 90.9 FM (available for a minimum pledge of $120 at this year’s funding drive, from October 23 through October 30) is a more eclectic mix than most. The organ-based jazz of Sinistrio sits between the freeform noise of No Two Eyebrows and the polished gospel harmonies of The Sojourners. Some might call it schizophrenic, but it’s also the best distillation you could hope for of the station’s “anything-that’s-awesome” approach.
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