Le cercle rouge

Uneasy but compelling Friday night viewing. Shot in colour but it feels black and white, and highlighted by an extended sequence (the central heist) with no dialogue whatsoever (maybe one or two words) - must've been at least 20 minutes, and might've been as long as 30 or 40. Noir/hard-boiled and 'cool', and thoroughly existential; layers upon layers.

(w/ trang + some of her folks, and Cassie and Kim)

"IMP June 2008"

A tasty mix, this one - one of my two or three favourites out of all those which have come through IMP in the last year and a half or so. The gal who made it obviously knows her way around this kind of music (lo-fi bedsit jangly pop, for want of a better way of describing it), and so there are spiritual forerunners and founding figures (Orange Juice, the Velvet Underground - that latter via "I Found a Reason"), more recent icons (Belle and Sebastian (a song, "Rhoda", that I not only didn't know, but is quality B&S into the bargain), the Magnetic Fields (the delicious "100,000 Fireflies"...I have a mandolin, I play it all night long, it makes me want to kill myself...), the Lucksmiths), assorted other scene figures (the Ladybug Transistor, Camera Obscura), a couple of slightly left-field but fitting selections (Sebastien Tellier's excellent funk soul electro pop ditty "Divine", She & Him's utterly charming "Sentimental Heart"[*]), and some seriously good tracks from acts that I've never even heard of before ("Givers Reply" by Ramona Cordova, "It's Going to Be Soon" by Rocketship).

(from Julie in Honolulu, HI)

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[*] She & Him of course piqued my interest, seeing as Zooey Deschanel is one of the reigning indie goddesses in my books, but somehow I didn't expect their stuff to be anything more than endearing throwaway pop pastiches at best. The album could still turn out to be like that, but "Sentimental Heart" hints at the possibility of something more - Deschanel's got a natural and rather captivating singing voice, and it's a well constructed and arranged song, complete with girl group harmonies in the bridge about two-thirds of the way through...this could be pretty good. What can you do with a sentimental heart, indeed.

"The Power of Ideas" (Melbourne Conversations @ BMW Edge)

Just for note, really. Larissa Behrendt, Richard Dennis, Rodney Hall and Julian Burnside on ideas and society, with an emphasis on why bad ideas so often thrive and good ideas stifled, and how the latter can be fostered and implemented. Best was Hall, making an elegant, lucid, poetic argument for the importance of the arts.

(w/ Emrys and Nicolette)

Paris, je t'aime

Funny. Unlike, say, Chacun son cinema, the several shorts comprising Paris, je t'aime have an overall coherency, its individual segments feeling like aspects of a whole. Not sure just what it is that binds them all together, except perhaps the obvious, Paris itself; it's an impression aided, no doubt, by the relative lack of 'auteur' tendencies in the directors of the various pieces.

A few that stuck in my mind: Gus van Sant's "Le Marais", in which one young man haltingly-eloquently wonders to another, a stranger, if they might be soulmates, all the while unaware that the other understands very little French, is pleasingly wry and ends perfectly; Alfonso Cuaron's "Parc Monceau" (Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier both note perfect) is just very appealing; Olivier Assayas' "Quartier des Enfants Rouge", despite being about nothing in particular (actress Maggie Gyllenhaal scores some drugs. The end.) somehow lingers (maybe it has a sort of infraordinary thing going); liked the Bob Hoskins/Fanny Ardant one, too, for the opportunity to see those two playing off each other; also, the one with Emily Mortimer was pretty good, though mainly because it was the one with Emily Mortimer (mind you, Oscar Wilde's showing up didn't hurt either); and the Elijah Wood vampire one, while OTT, was kind of cool (I didn't much like the other notably quirky one, the mime love story, though).

Aimee Mann - @#%&*! Smilers

On this, her latest, Mann mines a similar seam to that which yielded the riches to be found on The Forgotten Arm (see here, here and here), and to similar effect. Smilers is very much a twilight, autumnal record, guitar replaced almost entirely by piano and vocals consistently at the lower end of her register giving proceedings a muffled, quietly mournful air.

Smilers sees Mann further developing her seemingly increasingly downbeat take on pop classicism, easy listening am radio elements tempered by her unerring control of the form; while not overtly framed as a 'concept' album a la Forgotten Arm, there's a clear thread running through it and a sort of elegant musicality that I elsewise associate more or less exclusively with Summerteeth onwards-Wilco and New Adventures/Up-era R.E.M. when it comes to recentish pop music. "Looking for Nothing" is the song in which I hear that most clearly; it, "Great Beyond" and "Medicine Wheel" (those two coming across somewhat like the hinge pairing of "Little Bombs" and "That's How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart" which appears at a similar point in Forgotten Arm) and the hushed "Little Tornado" are my favourites. The record's yet to lodge squarely in my chest, but I can feel it working its way there...and, needless to say, it's marvellous just to have new Aimee Mann to listen to.

The Fountain

There's no doubting that Aronofsky had a vision in making this massively ambitious film, and had it come off, The Fountain would have been dizzyingly great (he's certainly got it in him - as discomfiting as it at times is, Requiem for a Dream remains a flat-out masterpiece and Pi, while flawed, isn't all that far behind), which makes it all the more a pity that instead it's a bloated, tedious mess, albeit one in which the glimmerings of a great film are clearly apparent. The failure certainly doesn't rest with the actors - Hugh Jackman is mesmerising, and Rachel Weisz, who has less to work with, pulls her weight too - and nor is it to be found in any particular element of the wider composition of the film...perhaps, the conceit is too large to be effectively rendered in an hour and a half of cinema (though it must be admitted that there's a pleasing ambiguity as to exactly what - and whose - the conceit is, and that some interpretations work much better than others).

Incidentally, I also found The Fountain a bit gruelling for reasons entirely unrelated to those recounted above, and considered stopping midway more than once on account of these other reasons...cryptic, cryptic; after a hiatus of a few months, I think that it may be time for me to begin keeping my (handwritten) diary again.

Kill Bill: Vols. 1 & 2

Man, these films are just so goddamn cool! Even when you know exactly what's coming, the sheer cinematic quality of the individual scenes and shots holds the attention - we take Tarantino's inventiveness and pop culture- and cinema-literacy for granted, but rewatching Kill Bill has reminded me of just how adept he is with his bag of tricks (I've never particularly thought of myself as a Tarantino fan, yet have much enjoyed all of his films that I've seen - Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and, of course, the Kill Bill instalment(s).)

I like the first volume much more than the second, but they do make more sense taken as a whole - and I think that splitting them into two is justifiable on artistic terms, though there's a deal too much padding in the second film in particular. It's all so over the top, and obviously, deliberately so, but also undeniably involving and exciting - the vividness of the images and set pieces and of the archetypes that are so lovingly invoked in them sells it...the two that linger are the interlude on Okinawa, its impact sealed by the use of Salyu's (Lily Chou-Chou's) "Kaifuku Suru Kizu" and, of all things, Zamfir's "The Lonely Shepherd", and the explosive showdown with O-Ren Ishii's underlings and its lyrical finale in the snowy garden outside.

The La's - The La's

Has a raggedness and a hint of fire along with its sparkly jangle and crunch that pushes the record to a level above most of this kind; there's much more to it than is suggested by "There She Goes", as deathless and great a song as that one is. That said, I don't think it's a great album but merely a rather good one, its finest moments (apart from aforementioned classic, "I Can't Sleep" and "Timeless Melody" stick out) frontloaded.

Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds

Takes its cues from Michael Jackson and Prince and mixes them up with a 21st century fuzzed-up gloss but without a real spark - an interesting misfire but a misfire nonetheless...or is it just that I don't really dig this kind of music?

"if you were a kiss ... then i'd be a hug" (IMP May 2008)

The first actual mixtape (as opposed to mix cd) that's come through the IMP, complete with mild distortion generated by the taping process. Two 90-minute sides, filled with lots of good music of a certain type - Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Jens Lekman, Grandaddy, Magnetic Fields, Nada Surf, Billy Bragg, etc, etc.

(from Danielle in Tallahassee, FL)

David Eddings - The Belgariad

Read this over a period of a few weeks, a few weeks ago. (Don't think I've read it before, though pretty sure I did the Malloreon some, ooh, 15 or so years ago.) I'd call it workmanlike rather than inspired, although I like some of the subtle reworking of classic high fantasy archetypes that Eddings engages in over its course...still, there was enough in it that I read all the way through to the end, of course.

Labyrinth

Well, it's a classic, innit? Like a lot of others around my age, my first exposure to Labyrinth was in primary school, and it left an indelible mark. I've seen it a few times since; it's still just as good as ever...and all the better that Bowie and Jennifer Connelly are in it, too!

(this time, w/ trang at the Fed Square atrium - 9am, Saturday morning!)

Muse - Black Holes & Revelations

I've liked Muse from the start, but never thought all that much of them. Each of their last couple of (studio) albums has yielded at least a couple of stand-out songs (looking back, I think "Hysteria" is probably my favourite of those), but they've never really registered for me as more than a slightly mad alt-hard rock outfit with a knack for the odd hyper-catchy guitar riff.

With Black Holes & Revelations, though, I'm finally completely sold - Muse are a really good band. After Origin of Symmetry and Absolution, the 'intensity' dial didn't really have another, higher setting, but evidently the 'massive' one did - Black Holes surpasses the band's previous efforts for sheer grandiosity, which takes some doing, but it hits hard and surprisingly focusedly despite the sprawling ambition. There are several highlights dotted throughout its running length (I particularly like "City of Delusion"), but it's best listened to as a whole, to get the full benefit of Bellamy & co's impressive range of ideas and tangents all at one go. And still, they don't seem to have overreached themselves - it all adds up to a very consistent album which takes its place in a remarkably consistent back catalogue...what do you know?

Gregory Maguire - Wicked

It's been a while since I last read this one, and it's held up pretty well (this was at least my third reading). I don't think I'd still say it was one of my very favourite books (see here) but it still affected me - it packs a serious punch, emotionally, intellectually and politically - and this time through I really appreciated the craft that's gone into the novel, particularly the way that Elphaba is reinvented and realigned for us each time she reappears, and the sturdiness of the structure which allows Maguire's ideas to come through as clearly as they do without getting in the way of the story.

(Funny, last time I read the novel, I definitely had a particular friend of mine in mind when imagining Elphaba; the same thing happened this time round, but with a different friend...in both cases, I'm not sure whether the comparison is flattering - or what it says about me and my relationship with those particular people...)

Big Star: Small World

It's striking how faithful nearly all of these covers are, even the two done by girls; indeed, some of them, the Gin Blossoms' "Back of a Car" and Matthew Sweet's "Ballad of El Goodo" in particular, are practically note-for-note, vocals and instruments alike near-indistinguishable from the originals. The best ones diverge a bit more from Big Star's classic versions, though none especially dramatically, those being Wilco's alt-country take on "Thirteen", the Posies' "What's Goin Ahn" and the Afghan Whigs' "Nightime". At ten songs, one of them a relatively recent cut by Big Star themselves (or at least as much of the band as had reformed/remained at the time of this cd), "Hot Thing" (the song's not much chop), it's brief for a compilation of this kind but boasts a decent roll-call of acts (apart from those I've already mentioned, others include Juliana Hatfield and Teenage Fanclub), and while the lack of reinterpretation of the songs doesn't do much for the memorability of the versions on the disc, the other side, of course, is that one can't go far wrong with such great source material.

Radiohead - "Airbag/How Am I Driving?" ep

As big a part of my life as music obviously is, I've never been the trainspotting or completist type; still, there are a couple of bands, Radiohead and the Cocteau Twins, whose every single, ep, etc I do tend to try to collect, not for the sake of owning the objects themselves but rather to hear the music they contain, even if this sometimes means buying a cd or record for only one or two often relatively minor tracks surrounded by a bunch that I already know, and so it is with this one, which was released on the heels of OK Computer in certain markets...what can I say, it's good.

Spoon - Telephono & "Soft Effects" ep

Their first couple of records, I think, and a fair bit faster-paced, more ragged and angrier than anything they laid down later. They ain't bad, but they ain't special either - at this point, they're more interesting as historical documents than in their own right.

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

More avant-pop from back in the day. Immediate, but interesting as well. Like it a lot. "In Every Dream Home a Heartache" is head and shoulders above the rest for me, but then I guess I've listened to it way more, too.

"Art Deco: 1910-1939" @ NGV International

Had a look at this because I was in town with a bit of spare time and because it was there. It didn't especially strike a chord with me - I have a fondness for some art deco architecture, and at this particular exhibition, I enjoyed looking at the glamour evening dresses and some of the jewellry, but really, to the extent that the movement appeals to me, it's on the level of the associations it summons (jazz age, etc) rather than for its intrinsic qualities...and there's always something a little bit sad about looking at objects mounted, bare and more or less out of context, in a gallery-type setting (of course, I'm more of an art kid than a design one, too).

Bande à part

The first Godard I've watched - probably, the first out-and-out 'nouvelle vague' film I've watched, actually - and I've been left thinking that while they're probably a bit of an acquired taste, it's likely to be a taste worth acquiring. I don't think it's stretching the point to describe Bande à part as postmodern - the metafictional/intertextual/breaking-of-the-third-wall aspects of the film are integral, as is its wilfully flippant attitude towards narrative - but it also has a distinctive (b&w) melancholy, a wistfulness, which has as much to do with the film's overall tone as its more brazen structural and stylistic affectations; its most whimsical elements perhaps partake of both those streams. Arthur, Franz and Odile somehow avoid graspability just as does the plot and direction of the film as a whole; it all has an effect that can't quite be described.

Vendela Vida - Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Cryptic in its apparent straightforwardness, economical in its use of language but with tendencies towards abstraction and lyricism, inward-looking while (at least on the surface) dwelling more on the details than on broad psychological sweep, at once teasingly unresolved and, in the end, satisfyingly wrapped up, Let the Northern Lights... is a good example of a movement that increasingly seems to me to be constituting something of a seachange in current (pun unintended) literary fiction, both in the sense of exemplifying the style and in that of providing an example of how it can be done well.

It's hard to put one's finger on just what comprises or defines that 'movement' or seachange or whatever; I've picked out a few authors who seem to fit within it before - Scarlett Thomas, David Mitchell (?), maybe Ali Smith, Steven Hall (on the strength of The Raw Shark Texts, Nicole Krauss - but, apart from being relatively well-to-do 'western' writers probably sharing a broadly similar cultural background, writing novels which are usually in contemporary settings and kinda modernist in sensibility even if they're often laden with postmodern tropes and flourishes (I often feel that Murakami is a bit of a spiritual fore-runner), which in turn involves a certain preoccupation with phenomenology and perspective (and ideas), I'm not sure exactly what I feel they have in common. It's not that they're my favourite contemporary writers, even amongst those who've got their starts in the last 10-15 years or so (in which case Donna Tartt, say, would certainly be amongst their number, though it must be said that her work has a classic, out of time feel to me, and, to take an example from the opposite perspective, I was more frustrated by The Accidental than I actually liked it); nor are they particularly the most acclaimed/popular meeting that 'kicked off in the last 10-15 years' criterion (in which case see Jeffrey Eugenides, Zadie Smith, JSF, Dave Eggers, etc, etc).

Well, anyway, be all that as it may, I liked Let the Northern Lights... a lot, for all of the reasons I've already mentioned. Its rendition of Clarissa's journey of discovery through chilly Scandinavia has a lightness of touch and an elegance which sits pleasingly with the novel's more human aspects (though it errs at times on the side of being too terse, I feel). It's convincing - not necessarily in the sense of being realistic (though, incidentally, it more or less is) but more in the sense of being true.

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'References' (because I wouldn't mind thinking a bit more about this 'movement' thing down the track)

Scarlett Thomas - Going Out, PopCo & The End of Mr Y
David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas & Black Swan Green
Ali Smith - The Accidental
Steven Hall - The Raw Shark Texts (some previous thoughts on this subject there)
Nicole Krauss - Man Walks into a Room & The History of Love

The Happening

A reasonably tense but all up fairly mediocre genre piece from Shyamalan. It's got a bit going for it - Wahlberg, Deschanel and John Leguizamo, some well done 'nature as threat' cinematography, a genuine sense of spookiness about a couple of the episodes (the interlude/climax at the American gothic Mrs Jones' home in particular) - but is ultimately disappointing in its failure to amount to anything much.

Sons & Daughters - The Repulsion Box

Basically a scuzzy indie-rock album with bits of punk, rockabilly and sped-up folk thrown in (I think I read somewhere that they're Scottish); even at just a tick over 30 minutes, it's a bit wearying as an 'entire listen' proposition, too many of its songs blurring into one thuddy, scratchy, heavy whole. Still, "Dance Me In"'s still genuinely exciting and pretty much worth the price of admission on its own; "Taste the Last Girl" also stands out a bit, coming across all late-period Smiths with its jangly electric guitar lines.

Jasper Fforde - The Eyre Affair

Is it really so long since I first read this? Things just keep on speeding up.