Into the Wild

I've gotta say, I respect this film in a way that I didn't think I would before I saw it - there's something magnificent about the thing, all two and a half hours of it, and there's no doubting how well it's crafted, following the wanderings of the fiercely idealistic Chris McCandless (it's based on a true story; it aspires to be a true story), who finishes college with great prospects and promptly gives all of his savings to charity and breaks off all communication with his family and old life to test himself in the wilds of America, winding up in what seems to him the purest possible embodiment of that ideal - the climax of his wanderings - alone in Alaska, subsisting on whatever he can shoot or forage, encountering a succession of marginal and outsider types en route.

It's a film that deepens as it goes along, in parallel with the deepening of our understanding of (or, at least, perspective on) its central character. I had thought it was going to be something like On the Road crossed with Walden, and this fear was only increased when the opening epigraph (bad news, that, in a film of this kind - an epigraph of any kind, I mean) came from that arch-Romantic Lord Byron, but it turns out to be considerably more complex than that, finally making its point about meaning and happiness explicit just a few minutes before its end.

Like I said, I respect the film, but in the end, I don't really rate it. It's heartfelt, sure, and quite impressive on its own terms (on those terms, I think it needs to be 2 1/2 hours long - to say that it's too long, as I was initially tempted to do, would be to miss the point)...but it didn't move me, and nor did it inspire me to re-evaluate my own life or beliefs, which would be a great example of criticising something for falling short of impossibly high standards, except that, by its very nature, Into the Wild sets itself up to be judged against just such standards...

(w/ Steph, who won the free tickets which were the only reason we went to see it)

Stephen King - The Dark Tower series

The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah & The Dark Tower

* * *

Inspired by Robert Browning's poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", it's obvious that this series means a lot to King; indeed, judging by the prefatory and closing remarks which appear in most of the volumes (not to mention the content - and the massive length - of the series itself), he seems to have come to regard it as his magnum opus - the central work in his massive ouevre and imaginary.

Above all else, it's a Western, tracing the gunslinger's weary progress towards the Tower, accompanied by his companions, and that predominant thread is woven through all of the books' other elements. And it's also structured as an epic, constructed around a plot with the highest of stakes and spanning huge distances and times - but this is where it falls down a bit, for while the story is strong, it doesn't compel in the way that the best books of this type do (which is not to say that the overarching narrative isn't plenty gripping - it'd have to be, to keep me reading through seven books at, on average, some 600 or 700 pages each!).

One of the striking things about the series is the extent to which each of its constituent books is limited to a particular part of the overall arc (which is not to say that they're in any real sense self-contained) - Wizard and Glass (largely devoted to Roland's relating of the story of his coming of age in Mejis) and the Seven Samurai-esque Wolves of the Calla particularly come to mind. The first in the series, The Gunslinger, is the most interesting, and, I reckon, comes closest to the spirit of Browning's poem in its cryptic, tersely poetic series of fragments, but it's not until The Drawing of the Three that King really hits his stride and things begin to take the shape they'll more or less hold for the duration.

To be honest, I was disappointed that it wasn't darker - I read the standalone short story "The Little Sisters of Eluria" a while back, and was very struck by its intensity and darkness, but the same isn't to be found in the series at large, which is more oriented towards action and (necessary, I suppose) exposition - and its central protagonist, Roland himself, not more solitary...but all up, while I don't think I'll be re-reading any time soon (probably not ever), it's eminently readable - and the last few pages make a killer ending, too.

Smokin' Aces

Smokin' Aces ain't half as cool as it wants to be - taking its cues from Tarantino & co, jive dialogue, comic book archetype villains and heroes, bloodbath climax, 'twist' ending and all, it ends up being far short of the colourfully violent film geek mainstream-cult piece for which it shoots. In the end, I think, the problem is that one just doesn't care about any of the characters, nor about the plot, and even the style isn't anything we haven't seen before.

The Descent

Not to put too fine a point on it, this movie scared the shit out of me. Six women go spelunking, get caved in, and find out that there's something alive down here; of course their group has its own pre-existing tensions, and once things go wrong, they go very, very wrong. One interesting gambit is the film's decision to show the monsters quite clearly (albeit with a tendency to drop shockingly suddenly into frame); another (maybe relatedly) is for the women to give a pretty good account of themselves when fighting for their lives against their subterranean hunters. It's all set up very economically, and almost from the outset is throat-clenchingly tense, punctuated by abrupt 'shock' moments, and ends well too. pfah!

Kylie Minogue - Impossible Princess

Impossible Princess was going around at about the time when I really started getting into music, and I have distinct impressions of all four of the singles (including their videos - unusual for me), all of which got plenty of radio play at the time, and each quite different from the others: "Some Kind Of Bliss" (cruisey pop-rocker and truthfully quite blissful - yearny and sort of shut-eyed-in-the-sunshine happy), "Did It Again" (groovy, and catchy as all hell), "Cowboy Style" (techno-cowboy funk) and "Breathe" (mellow and fluid).

The album, then (I've been meaning to buy it for years and years, but have only managed to do so just now): a pleasant, electro-inflected pop album with a few hints of indie stylings, but in the end a bit too repetitive to be really interesting.

Pixies - Bossanova

Hey, hey, this is excellent - love the demented surf-rock thing they've got going on here. It's deliciously, deeply pop, too, and though it seems off-handed, almost tossed-off, it's pretty great in a 'just below the surface' sort of way (a bit like the Breeders' Pod, say).

Emmylou Harris - Roses in the Snow

On paper, it's impeccable - Emmylou Harris doing a bluegrass record - and that's pretty much the way it is on record, too. 'Pristine', the liner notes call it, and aptly (though the album's lively, too, when it ought to be) - simply put, everything works.

"Voicing Emily" @ Beckett Theatre, the Malthouse

A so-called 'lieder-opera', this show combines elements of both those forms ('lieder' being 'art songs', and 'opera' being, irreducibly, opera), mixing them in with spoken word interludes both pre-recorded and live, and a stream of visual images projected on to screens behind the performers - three singers, all dressed in white, representing different stages in the life of their subject, Emily Dickinson, and three musicians (piano, acoustic guitar, cello) - to produce an impressionistic-thematic account of Dickinson's life and work (the 'libretto' is a setting to music of her poems, including some of her most famous), organised thematically rather than strictly chronologically or biographically ("death", "home", "Susan", "nature", "Samuel", "immortality").

Described like that, it probably sounds a mess - but actually it was quite wonderful. Dickinson is my favourite poet, and this performance rung true - it reminded me of many of the reasons why I fell in love with her work in the first place...above all else, she felt things so intensely, and through her poetry we are at once brought into the presence of something true and larger than ourselves and reminded of its fundamental unknowability. There's a mystery at the heart of everything she wrote, and yet it speaks directly to us.

(w/ trang + Arthur)

* * *

There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself -
Finite infinity.

Princess Mononoke

Many of the sequences in Princess Mononoke, and particularly some of those painting the landscapes through which Ashitaka travels between his home town and the land of the Iron town and the forest, made me wish that I lived someplace where there's more space - not just physical but also, I suppose, metaphysical (in this instance, the two are related)...someplace where people can properly be, heroic or villainous or some combination of the two, in a way far larger than that allowed by my own current circumstances...another sense in which it's a fantasy, I suppose. That aside, this is a pretty sweet film (ie, I liked it) - it's technically very impressive, which translates into a seamlessly immersive viewing experience, and has a nice blend of lightness and weight...

The Drones - Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By

One from Jon, who went so far as to describe this band's music as transcendent one Friday afternoon. Now, transcendence is always contingent and particular (or have I precisely missed the point?), but having listened to this album pretty solidly over the last few days, I think I can see his point, at least out of the corner of my eye...because although it initially feels like just another rock album (albeit one tied together by some extremely solid songs and tight playing), there's more to Wait Long... than meets the eye - I can't put it better than to say that the record has a sense of depth which sets it well apart from the run of the mill. ("Shark Fin Blues" is the one that I listen to over and over, but I get the feeling that it may be an entry point in more ways than one.) I was walking around listening to the album today, and it just felt right.

Joss Stone - Mind, Body & Soul

Puts me in mind of nothing so much as a smoother Janis Joplin, with more of an emphasis on the 'soul' and less on the rock and roll - although, it has to be said, not approaching Joplin's work on either count. That's the thing about the similarities - to a point, they work in Stone's favour, because I like Joplin, but inevitably Mind, Body & Soul also suffers by comparison, 'cos as I've said before, Janis Joplin was basically a goddess. Still, this is a pretty listenable album, and a couple of songs - "Security" and "Sleep Like A Child" are extremely good.

Elliott Smith - XO

David and I used to half-joke that, when we're 30, all we'll listen to is Elliott Smith (a designation including ES himself but also using him as shorthand for a certain kind of music); well now, not yet 30 but here we are - Elliott Smith indeed. I've listened to "Waltz #2" a lot over the years, but on my first proper listen to XO, while I pricked my ears up at that one, it was much deeper into the record, at the appearance of a mournful electric guitar figure, that I found a thought fully formed in my mind: "oh, glory". Melodramatic yes, but that's how the response came to me - and damn it, it is a glorious moment.

That moment came about midway through "Bottle Up And Explode!" - it's still one of my favourites, but the effect was in no small part due to its positioning after the sparenesses of what comes before, lines upon lines of Smith's acoustic guitar and expressive but unadorned singing, embellished unobtrusively by minor chamber-pop elements, wrapped up into little two or three minute songs. So far, I like this album rather than loving it, but there's a real charm and piquancy to it, not to mention (in light of his biography) an incipient (well, more than partly realised) sorrow.

Fleetwood Mac - Rumours

Pleasant, but yet to reveal anything to me which would justify its status as a classic - so far as I can see, it's just a fistful of nice tunes (admittedly including, in "Dreams", an honest to goodness genius moment) and a couple of other less memorable ones. Maybe my expectations were too high.

Stephen King - Cell

Man really is a great storyteller. I read him despite not having any especial fondness for horror or for adventure novels (those being the two main genres within which his work sits) because his writing has that quality that can't be faked - it pulls like a steam train (it also gets under my skin and often leaves me a little unnerved). Of course, it doesn't hurt when, as in this one, an apocalypse is in the offing (anything he writes in that vein will always be in the shadow of The Stand, but it has to be said that he's attempting something a little bit different here, and the way in which the victims of the 'pulse' evolve collectively is really quite interesting)...

Infernal Affairs

Taut and cool, and great dynamics everywhere one turns. Didn't see where it was going; indeed, was too involved in each moment to even attempt to guess at any point. Next up, The Departed.

"Nick Cave: The Exhibition" @ the Arts Centre

Liked this, but feel it would have a lot more to offer the genuine hardcore Nick Cave fan than a passer through like myself. That's not to say that his music doesn't loom pretty large for me - there was the No More Shall We Part period and the The Good Son phase, and then there are the heavy associations which come with "The Ship Song" plus moments with many others of his songs (including, recently, "Do You Love Me?"), and of course there's always "Shivers" - but rather that I've never been a lock and stock devotee in the way that he inspires in many. It is pretty neat the way the centre of the room is laid out like Cave's office (and it was interesting to read about the importance of the idea of the office to his creative process/imagination); all up, I think the exhibition gives a pretty good sense of the man, by which, of course, I mean the myth - ie, it was very (latter-day) 'Nick Cave'.

Resident Evil

Goddamnit, I got hustled into renting this by the trailer for the latest one but had clean forgotten that I already saw it; it wasn't any good this time round, either, and yet I watched it all the way through...go figure.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Felt much about this as I did the first time, perhaps a bit less into it this time round.

21st century fairy tales

The Guardian has three very pleasing "fairy tales fit for the 21st century", written by Hilary Mantel, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Audrey Niffenegger. Best is the one by Mantel, who I like every time I come across her by way of fragments like these - I'll need to check out one of her books...

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Fittingly, the finest moment in this epic film, all two and a half hours of it, is the assassination scene, James, Ford and his brother Charley moving around and taking their appointed places in James' sun-filled sitting room as if propelled by slowly unwinding clockwork, Cave and Ellis' melancholy score coiling and redoubling upon itself all the while, until at last, the gunshot, the long deferred end towards which everything else to that point has been a single extended dying fall - at its best, Assassination is slow burning and magnificent.

A western but then not, with shades of a character study but ultimately inclined to leave its central figures undeciphered, oriented from its very title towards a single, inevitable action but content to take a series of divergent, meandering paths along the way, shot through with some of the most astonishing landscape cinematography I've seen in a long time, it's soaringly ambitious - and almost, almost pulls it off. That it doesn't quite get there can only be attributed to something ineffable - a subtle failure to completely coalesce, somehow - but even so it's a real achievement.

Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck dominate affairs, whether when onscreen or by their absence, their uneasy relationship the tense central spring from which the narrative derives much of both its immediate and ongoing drive, but the film doesn't play as a two-hander; rather, a whole cast of others move prominently through events, appearing and recurring at intervals. Indeed, those supporting characters are a huge strength of the film - they're uniformly economically but effectively written and drawn, portrayed and inhabited by an understatedly brilliant cast (though, not really a propos, I must confess to being disappointed that Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel, two of the cutest female actors going around today, didn't get more screen time).

Scienceworks

Kind of an unlikely excursion, but Andrew L and Lily wanted to go, and it's not like I ever say no when people invite me to these things. Anyhow, it was kinda fun, but you know, not all that much. Shame we didn't get to see a planetarium show (sold out), though - that would've been a highlight for sure.

"Game Over" (IMP August 2007)

I suspect that there's some kind of concept to this mix, but it's beyond me what that concept may be.

The cd leads off with seven heavy metal/hard rock tracks in a row, by outfits so famous that I've even heard of all but one (the exception being Gojira, which I choose to believe is Japanese for 'Godzilla'; having watched one or two of the Japanese Godzilla films in my time, I don't think that this is completely impossible). The two which have left most of an impression on me are "Phantom of the Opera" by Iron Maiden (live, no less - sadly not a cover of the Lloyd Webber show tune, but equally dramatic) and "Sleepwalker" by Megadeth - both catchy in that riffy kind of way - and, for old times' sake, a live version of "Head Like A Hole" is also welcome.

Then, a glammy 90s-sounding rocker (harmonies and all) by a band called the Wildhearts ("Bi-Polar Baby" - pretty good) and a more meat-and-potatoes hard rock tune from Terrorvision (previously known to me only through their rousing cover of "Forever & Ever"), after which we get, in order, a cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter" by the Bangles (v.g., of course), the theme from "Enter the Dragon", something by the Music, a cool Moloko song ("Fun for Me"), "Central Reservation" (still affecting, and in much the same way, after all these years), a dreamy Ash guitar ballad, an acoustic guitar romance (no vocals, anonymous artist), and then a live Joan Baez weepie. It's all quite surprisingly listenable, but like I said, I don't get it as a whole.

(from Matt in Bournemouth, England)

Rome (season 1)

Satisfyingly very - blood, sex and speeches in equal quantities. The show begins with Caesar's final victory in Gaul, Pompey wielding power from the Senate in Rome, and in the space of this one season covers the overthrow of both amidst the machinations of dozens of others, including many known to us through Shakespeare and the history books - Mark Antony, Brutus, Cicero, Cleopatra...indeed, that's my main quibble with Rome, which I enjoyed a great deal (if a second season was made, I'll definitely seek it out): the way that everything seems to happen so quickly - major events, shifts, upheavals, all take place in the span of a 40 minute or so episode, and so something of a sense of scope is lost.

That said, one of the show's strengths is the emphasis it gives to the stories of the other personages making their way through Rome and its empire - particularly the centurion Lucius Vorenus and his family. And it deals well with translation issues, giving the viewer a largely unjudgemental take on society of the time and its mores...it's made me interested to learn more about all of its characters and the events it depicts - though I'll be surprised if I get beyond wikipedia in that regard...

(lent to me by Gian, ages ago)

M.I.A. - Kala

Arular was pretty good at the time, and M.I.A. live showed a bit too, but still, I didn't expect her second album to be good at all, and hadn't listened to it properly until a few days ago; well, I sure got that one wrong. Kala is a large step in a whole range of different directions and, in its totality, a vivid pop album which doesn't sound much like anything else out there.

"Boyz" is the standout - I hardly understand a word of it, but that's no hinderance to recognising its genius. Particularly like "$20" too; like all of the tracks on Kala, it strikes an ideal balance between beats and melody, busy-ness and structure, sounds and song. We already knew that the girl had talent - now, it's beginning to seem as if she might be the real thing.

Stephen Donaldson - Fatal Revenant

Never mind objectivity, I left behind any semblance or possibility of even critical distance about this series years ago. This is the new one, and it's good; there are two to go; that's all.

(previously in these 'last chronicles': The Runes of the Earth)