Kate Nash - Made of Bricks

Fun! Probably not a stayer (unlike, a bit to my surprise, Alright, Still, which I still get out pretty often, especially when out and about) but with enough good bits to make listening to it as a whole a viable option, an' I like the attitude. Standout's "Pumpkin Soup" (previously known to me, with equal if not greater justification, as the "I just want your kiss boy" song).

J'attends quelqu'un

Unexpectedly, my favourite of the three I've caught at the french film festival over the last fortnight or so. It's carefully equivocal in its layering and interweaving of its various narratives, such that resonances &c are always implied rather than actually rendered, but also eventually succeeds in bringing everything to a satisfying and affecting resolution while at every point avoiding the obvious move (see, eg, the 'making a pass while moving furniture' and the 'I'm having a baby' bits).

(w/ Ruth and Meribah)

Philip Pullman - The Scarecrow and His Servant

I didn't see anything special about this one, to be honest. It's not a patch on the His Dark Materials series, nor on the Victoriana ones - although nor does it set out to cover that kind of territory, being aimed at a younger audience and accordingly simpler.

Le voyage du ballon rouge

My first Hou Hsiao Hsien, and not precisely what I'd expected - much more in the social realist vein than I'd expected, to begin with! But 'social realism' isn't precisely what was going on here - more a kind of cinematic naturalism, interleaved with moments of pure cinema (the latter mostly involving the course of the red balloon itself). The film's pleasures are subtle but real, and it has an affect which has lingered even though 'the film itself' didn't leave much of an impression at the time.

(w/ Ruth, Jarrod, Steph and Roslyn)

"Love Song" (John Kolvenbach) (MTC)

Near the end of the rather excellent "Love Song", one of the characters declares "death to literalism!"; I wondered whether that line mightn't have been the genesis for the whole play. "Love Song" is about love and imagination, and how the two can (perhaps always must) meet, and it's pretty much perfect on its own terms.

Four main characters: Beane, one of society's misfits, living in his apartment under the barest of conditions, has his life illuminated one day by a spunky burglar with whom he falls in love; his career-minded sister and her husband find their lives also affected by this unexpected turn of events. All of the actors were pitch-perfect (Julia Zemiro particularly stole all of her scenes as the sister), the sets were unobtrusively integrated into the play text, and all told it was just one of those in which all of the elements came together - the play itself perfectly balanced between sweetness and edge, the production bringing out that delicate interaction and the interesting contrasts it entails to a treat. It's a minor thing, but the emotional palette from which it paints is nuanced and pleasing, and I liked the play a lot.

[part of an MTC subscription with Steph, Sunny & co]

Chacun son cinéma

Cool concept - a whole bunch of basically most of the most famous mainstream arthouse contemporary directors going around today (Wenders, Polanski, Egoyan, Campion, Kiarostami, the Dardenne brothers, Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, Lars von Trier, Wong Kar-Wai, Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, to name just a few), each doing a very short (~ 3 minutes) piece on the subject of the cinema. As one would expect, it's pretty hit and miss, the narrative-oriented ones just as likely to be successful as the more impressionistic pieces, and a few reasonably predictable themes emerge, most notably the transformative, immersive, participatory and (of course) magical nature of the cinematic experience, but the good ones are strikingly good, and there are plenty of minor pleasures in amidst the real highlights, too.

My fave was the Inarittu piece, "Anna", which is simply one of the most lushly Romantic things that one will ever see in a cinema. It's beautiful - three minutes of holding your breath and feeling opened up to something that's at once completely familiar and utterly foreign. The David Lynch one was extremely David Lynch, and a nice snippet of his unique brand of craziness (ware the giant scissors!); the Atom Egoyan contribution also marvellous - a miniature existential meditation, inscrutable and poetic. Jane Campion's odd lady bug piece also stood out...

(w/ Ruth and Bec P)

Jens Lekman @ Corner Hotel, Monday 10 March

For various reasons, my mind wasn't on the music as much as it might've been, but nonetheless I enjoyed this show; he played "Black Cab" second song up, which was basically the whole reason I went along, so I was happy, and the rest of it was nice too.

(w/ SL, Ruth and Keith)

Do You Believe in Love? A Creation Compilation

Break it down: this came out in 1990, and it's a Creation comp, so there are three main threads running through it - acid/ravey Screamadelica type stuff, post-80s guitar indie, and shoegaze of varying textures. The cd's frontloaded with three of its best tracks - "You're Just A Skin To Me" (Primal Scream), "Girl Go" (Jazz Butcher) and "Chelsea Girl" (Ride) - but keeps up the quality throughout (it doesn't hurt that there's a MBV classic, "No More Sorry", in the middle there somewhere). Nice.

Goldfrapp - Seventh Tree

Got a message from Michelle the other day; words to the effect of "have you listened to the new Goldfrapp yet? It's exquisite"; wouldn't go that far myself, but I can see where she was coming from. Seventh Tree is the band's most pastoral and soupily dreamy to date, from airily disconnected opener "Clowns" through the succession of downbeat electro-ballads and wispy sketches which follow (I especially like "Cologne Cerrone Houdini" / "Caravan Girl" near the end), and there's much to relish about it.

Felt Mountain, Black Cherry and Supernature collectively set an impossibly high bar, and I think that Seventh Tree falls slightly short of those other three - but it's still a worthy addition to the discography and another jewelled link in the increasingly glittering Goldfrapp chain.

Now, bring on the new Portishead!

Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon - Preacher: Alamo

The last in the series, and suitably explosive and bloody. Reflecting on how I came to work my way through the lot despite not having any particular taste for ultra-violence nor for the grit that characterises the series, and particularly while having some serious reservations about the politics / ideological standpoints of the books, I think there are (lemme count) three main reasons.

First, they're written and drawn with a helluva sense of pace - each one flies by (I read this last in a single sitting in the Fitzroy library a couple of weekends ago). Second, while Preacher isn't long on character development as such, Ennis excels in deepening our understanding of the characters as he goes along. And third, there's the mythos invoked by the books, and ultimately that's what gets me (even if, on closer inspection, it possibly turns out to be bound up rather closely with the essentially conservative viewpoint espoused by the books that troubles me).

[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6 & 7], [8].

"2007 cd"

David's mix of his key tracks from last year (which reminds me that I should put up the tracklist from my own, made a while back). It was the soundtrack to my very gauzey, distracted last Sunday, particularly "McFearless" (Kings of Leon) and "23" (Blonde Redhead); of the ones that were new to me, the other that I particularly like is the National's "Fake Empire". A lot of very 'David' stuff on here, natch, much of which falls in the overlap between his and my tastes (Radiohead, Spoon and the Arcade Fire all get multiple slots), and some which are definitely in his camp (QOTSA, White Stripes, Ian Ball, Pete Yorn) - lots of replay value for me and, in those first three I mentioned, a trio of genuine song 'discoveries'.

"Astor Piazzolla" (10-cd set)

10 cds of recordings which tend more towards the 'song' end of Piazzolla's spectrum - an impression added to by the high proportion of them which have vocals - and which are just as pleasing as the more polished "rough guide". Yes!

"Rock 'n' Roll" (Tom Stoppard) (MTC)

My first MTC outing this year, having subscribed for '08 as part of Steph and Sunny's troupe, and quite possibly the one about which I've been most enthused, it being a Stoppard and all, and not only that, but also being about (a) revolution; (b) communism and (c) (but of course) rock 'n roll.

Well, I liked it well enough, but in the end the play didn't do that much for me. I found it a bit stagey - a fault which resided partly with the actors (it didn't help that Matthew Newton's Jan reminded me entirely incongruously of Manny from Black Books (manner of talking, hair, and, as Ben K pointed out, wardrobe)) but lay primarily in the play itself, I think. The first half was rather overly schematic, particularly in terms of the laying out of the various perspectives on (a), (b) and to a lesser extent (c) by way of their exemplifying characters; the second half moved a bit more, the characters and ideas better coming to life; the ending really didn't satisfy me at the time, but with a bit of distance, it's better than I'd initially thought...

Kelly Clarkson @ Rod Laver Arena, Tuesday 4 March

I'd been anticipating this more than I do most shows - I don't see much out and out Pop live, and I really expected Kelly to be an experience, particularly given how much I listened to Breakaway over the second half of last year. Lest there be any doubt, there's not a smidgeon of ironic or postmodern expectation of kitsch, etc - this is all grounded in genuine love of pop music done well.

So anyway, it was pretty much what I wanted it to be without quite being the bee's knees. I got to hear the songs I really wanted to hear, and she's definitely got a powerful voice...but the sound wasn't as full as one might hope (a bit of a problem with the venue as much as anything else, I suspect) and for the most part she seemed to more be belting the songs out rather than imbuing them with any particular expressiveness - so while it was good, it wasn't the, y'know, spectacular spectacular that I'd thought it might be.

* * *

Supports Mandy Moore and Sean Kingston - both worth the seein', in this context, anyway.

(w/ Steph)

The Cardigans - Best Of

Well, of course this is great. "I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer" is still a brilliant pop streak and "Lovefool" somehow never gets old, but it's actually the band's first single "Rise & Shine" (which I hadn't heard before) and old radio favourite "My Favorite Game" which have most had me hitting the repeat button. It's all, barring a small handful of tracks that drag a little, very, very delicious.

The liner notes are a feature, too, the band having put together some thoughts about each of the songs on the cd, and showing themselves to be very knowing (both about themselves as pop stars, and as musicians) and cutely witty (eg, of "My Favorite Game": "Nina recorded her vocals in the attic of our studio, with the corpse of a bat as her only company. Potential hit makers, take note!").

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

David came round last Monday, which happened to coincide with a low emotional and physical ebb for me - too much going out, too much doing things, and not enough recharging - which maybe made it kind of a happy or at least apt coincidence that we settled on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to watch, for while it was a bit of a gruelling experience in the state that I was then in, the insane whirligig it plays out wasn't a world removed from my own exhaustion-hued (albeit entirely un-drug affected) take on things. The result, anyway, is that I wasn't left with any coherent sense of the film - just a bewildering series of impressions - which maybe is the way that it would always have taken me anyway. Certainly, the sense of inhabiting the film's world was strong, even overwhelming.

Francoise Sagan - Bonjour Tristesse

Reminded me a fair bit of Gatsby, although not as perfect, of course. This was Nicolette's prospective take on it, which, in retrospect, paints a fair picture of what Bonjour Tristesse is like:

As an interesting aside, this book was published when our author was just 18. Apparently she was nicknamed "the charming little monster" which makes me grin no-end. Anyway, she had a varied life, writing several books and plays, getting married a couple of times, hanging out with Truman Capote for a bit, being convicted of using cocaine, and being left in a coma after a car accident in her Aston Martin. Ooh, she was also done for tax fraud in 2002 which resulted in the French government taking the royalties from all her works and leaving her essentially penniless and relying on the kindness of her friends. How fun!

Basically it's one of those glittering literary baubles, fleeting but somehow perfectly crystallised, both in itself and in terms of what it depicts - here, a kind of summer-dream end of innocence narrative of the sort that we all always hold so dear when done well, recognisably universal precisely inasmuch as it's writ in the details of Cécile's rueful recollection of the fateful events surrounding her and her supporting cast (Anne, Cyril, Elsa and, of course, her playboy father Raymond).

Lisa Miller @ CERES, Friday 29 February

Saw her here around this time a couple of years ago (I really thought it was just last year, but a check of the archives tells me otherwise!), and this was a similar experience. Not transcendent, but nice.

(w/ Swee Leng and her friend Sara, and Wei and Julian F)

King Arthur

This - or at least the director's cut version, which I saw - was surprisingly satisfying in patches. Clive Owen always brings a certain something, and his turn as Arthur, reimagined as a Roman centurion commanding a group of Salmatian [?] 'knights' south of Hadrian's wall in partly-conquered Britain, is no exception - he has a suitable controlled ferocity, as well as the gravitas that almost allows one to take seriously all the speechifying about free will and destiny...but parts of the film just don't ring true, and that's where it falls down - there are too many false notes (the real classics of the genre - the Bravehearts and the Gladiators - don't have any), abovementioned explicitly fixation on freedom and individual liberty being one particularly intrusive example (it's a perfectly fine theme, but the problem arises when the characters continually talk directly about it, particularly when said talk's in platitudes). Still, a fun enough film (in that oh-so-serious kind of way).

Stars @ East Brunswick Club, Thursday 28 February

This is how I put it when suggesting to David that we check out Stars: "I think they will be sweet live, and they might be just under the radar enough that the rest of the punters will actually be starry-eyed (pun unintended) indie romantics rather than idiot hipsters." And you know what, I think that that was actually pretty close to the mark in the end (and with a sell-out crowd no less). What I can say for certain is that it was a very nice show despite Stars turning out to be only really an average-to-good live act, not as crashy as I'd expected and a bit wavery in places, but still from opener "The Night Starts Here" and minor classic "Elevator Love Letter" through most of Set Yourself On Fire and In Our Bedroom After The War (the obvious ones, "Take Me To The Riot" and "Bitches In Tokyo" really taking off from the latter, and the cast-iron high points from the other, particularly "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" and "One More Night (Your Ex-Lover Remains Dead" hitting hard from the earlier) it was a nice way to spend an evening.

(w/ David + Justine)

Napoleon Dynamite

I've been deliberately steering clear of Napoleon Dynamite - I'm not much of a one for what I (unkindly) dub quirky indie loser films and this seemed likely to be the epitome of the type. But everyone kept telling me how good it is, and eventually I caved in, and what do you know, it lives up to the hype in its low-key, off-kilter way. It's a film that genuinely goes its own way - it doesn't seem to be ticking boxes or anything of that kind. Instead, it just does its thing, and a good thing that is. I value films like these, because they remind me - oh yeah, I am an outsider...and possibly that part of me isn't nourished near enough these days, I suspect. (It also, not entirely unrelatedly, left me in a terrible mood the night I watched it but that's the flip side I suppose.)

The Village

Unfortunately I knew the twist, and (independently) the film tends towards being overly schematic and obvious, particularly near the end, but The Village is still a pretty effective bit of film-making. It definitely benefits from a top notch cast - Joaquin Phoenix, now that I've gotten over my instinctive dislike of him, is consistently convincing, Bryce Dallas Howard, who I've not seen before, was very good in coming to be the centre of the film (her air of luminous innocence is critical), Adrien Brody also held the gaze, playing against type as the village idiot - and it has that M Night Shyamalan feel...

Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon and John McCrea - Preacher: All Hell's A-Coming

This is where I stalled when I was reading these a couple of years back, entirely because it was missing from Rowden White. Yeesh, they're violent - but gripping, yeah.

Terry Pratchett - Making Money

Enjoyable - there's just something so comforting about Pratchett books. I liked being able to read another Moist von Lipwig one so soon after the last, too - and the series has developed in a way that allows recurring characters to just drop in (in this one, mostly members of the watch) without any explanation but very pleasingly for long-time readers. Most of the way through my second reading at the moment...

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Well, I pretty much knew in advance what I was going to get with this one (in a word: PIRATES), and it satisfied. Also, this was the first film in which Keira, latterly the subject of so many strongly-held opinions of both the 'love her' and 'hate her' (ie, 'think she's hot' / 'can't stand her') variety, has made any particular impression on me - the realisation that she is, after all, very attractive coming more or less simultaneously with a strong feeling of irritation at the way she just pouts all the time...catch 22.