Tideland

Kind of like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas combined with Alice in Wonderland, and every bit the mess that you'd expect to result from that admixture. Very Gilliam, and as such of course visually striking in patches, but overall too all over the place to amount to much.

Alphaville

Mm, I think I'm developing a bit of a taste for Godard (or 'JLG', as he calls himself according to Adrian Martin's review of a recent biography of the director in the latest Monthly) - this one's a sci-fi noir melange with strong satirical overtones and lots of fun in a deadpan sort of way. I hate to put it like this, but there's just something so cool about it.

(previously: Bande à part)

[Edit: I meant to mention that it was also pleasing to gaze at the fashion and general aesthetic and map them on to that of Welcome To Alphaville, one of my favourite clothing stores...]

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake

Well-written and readable (not necessarily the same thing), and thankfully not at all in the picaresque, magic realist, fabulistic vein of much 'Indian literature' - rather, it's notably, and impressively, precise and crisp in its use of language - but lacking anything to particularly pull me in, quickly and painlessly though I got through the book. I'm just not that interested in this kind of story.

Scoop

Insubstantial but entertaining enough, Allen and Johansson quite amusing together. Not as good as I'd hoped, but on reflection, really much as I'd expected.

Siri Hustvedt - The Sorrows of an American

This just might be the best book I've read all year; in fact, I'm almost certain that it is. It's kind of the way I see API in my mind, except more grown up, and written in the kind of prose that I most admire - spare, elegant, deceptively transparent. Nothing seems forced, everything hangs together perfectly - it's real writing in a way that a lot of showy contemporary stuff doesn't get near.

Like What I Loved, it begins with a letter, this one found by middle-aged intellectuals Erik and Inga Davidsen as they go through their recently deceased father's effects and suggesting an illicit involvement of some kind with a mysterious woman, years ago. From there, it reveals itself to be a kind of character/milieu portrait which functions both 'horizontally' (that is, taking its subject-matter in cross-section, more or less at a point in time, albeit with a strong emphasis on historical shading-in of that present time) and 'linear-temporally' (in that it does have a reasonably strong forward drive, generated by the 'detective story' threads making up the narrative and by the characters' arcs.

My comments about A Plea for Eros and What I Loved (see above) at the time that I read them go some way to describing what it is about Sorrows that so appeals - in both thematic preoccupations and style, Hustvedt is just my type, even though her particular foreground subjects have little immediate pull for me. As far as modern literature goes, it doesn't come much better than this.

Alien & Aliens

I've seen these before, but for some reason was in the mood to revisit them (nb: it's surprisingly difficult to find Alien 3 in dvd stores!). They don't grip quite as much on re-viewing, and I'm sure the small screen doesn't help either; still, both remain impressive in design and in execution.

R.E.M. - "Bittersweet Me" cd single

In the context of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, "Bittersweet Me" is only really a middling song - but that's no serious criticism given that, for mine, New Adventures is the best of R.E.M.'s many great albums, not to mention one of my favourite records by any artist full stop. This single has a couple of alternate versions of songs from the album, a fairly tough "Undertow" which adheres closely to the studio version and an acoustic "New Test Leper", and a live take on "Wichita Lineman" which isn't as good as it might've been, but is still pretty dern good.

Neko Case & Her Boyfriends - Furnace Room Lullaby

Great, in the way that all Neko Case records are. With the benefit of hindsight (and having listened to them all out of order), I can hear this as the big step forward for her - of the studio lps at any rate, while The Virginian was plenty listenable but a bit rough around the edges, Furnace Room Lullaby is much more polished, and better for it, a midday-through-to-late-afternoon (shading into night) precursor to the noirisms of Blacklisted (itself followed by the most fully realised of her records to date, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood).
My heart has lightened as spring has announced itself in the past few weeks; it strikes me that Case's music can be listened to at any time of year. It sounds good in the blazing heat of summer, but likewise in the chill of winter; the resonance it carries is altered but no less poignant in the mezzanine months. I don't tire of it at all.

The Edge of Love

Tamara and I have been trying to get it together to see this for a while, both inspired by the likely look of the film (in my case, at least, encouraged by the trailer). Anyhow, we finally managed it last night, Shaun joining us (because he likes Dylan Thomas, of all reasons!), and I'd have to say that it was about as I anticipated, though not all that I'd hoped. The 1940s setting comes to life, which is to say that it's at once vivid and somehow faded, scarlets and spotlights and soft, nostalgic edges, in sets, costumes, and all the little details; in the central roles, Keira, Sienna, Cillian, and Matthew Rhys as Thomas himself, all look right and do solid work.

Actually, locating the centre of the film is no easy exercise, which is one of the problems with it...the figure of Dylan Thomas is the hinge but he comes across as something of a cipher, and the relationship between Vera and Caitlin, while rendered with some conviction and depth, isn't quite developed in a way which convinces that it's what The Edge of Love is actually about; the spectre of the war haunts events, somewhat as it does in Atonement but even more so, yet can't be said to be the film's central concern in any meaningful sense. It's a film that either doesn't quite know what it wants to be, or does know but doesn't quite succeed in getting there...I think it shoots for melancholy, sweeping, romantic (the lush Badalamenti score is a strong hint in respect of all three of those), and at the same time warm, a bit earthy, filled with life, but it's just not quite there; it sets itself at meaningful character study but also indulges in broad-brush impressionistic gestures, and again it falls a bit short of what it aims for. (It also feels much longer than it is, which can't be a good sign.)

On balance, though, the good outweighs the bad; I wouldn't watch it again, but I was pretty happy to have seen it.

Though lovers be lost love shall not ...

An idea

So I thought that maybe I would try to watch all of my favourite films, as nearly as I can ascertain (given that unlike songs or albums, say, one revisits films relatively infrequently if at all) - 20 or 30, or maybe even 50 (yes, I have a list) - over some short period of time, not for any particular reason really, but just because. Might be a seriously bad idea, though, given that most of 'em fall somewhere between somewhat and extremely sad - or, at least, that's what I get out of them - and maybe it's not so wise to take risks with one's mood over spring, when all things are fragile in any event...well, we'll see.

The Last Town Chorus @ Hi-Fi Bar, Friday 12 September

Very nice indeed; for mine, the pleasures of Wire Waltz are, while real, not particularly vivid, but live she was scintillating, ipod backing track clear but relatively muted in volume, allowing her sweet, strong voice to come through with the clear vibrato of the lap steel in overlapping waves. All too brief at only six songs (or was it five?), but including "It's Not Over" and "Modern Love", and totally worth it.

(w/ Michelle and a friend of hers, Sarjeet; having little interest in seeing the other support, Sunshine Brothers, and none in seeing the main act, Ash Grunwald, I stayed for about three songs of the former's pleasant enough but uninteresting trumpet-led reggae-dub stylings before making my getaway...life's too short.)

21 Grams

Primed for it though I was by Inarittu's gorgeous contribution to Chacun son cinéma, I almost gave up on 21 Grams about 15 minutes in - the grittiness combined with the rapid jumping between stories and times was keeping me at a distance, and I was pretty tired. It repays the effort, though, unfurling into something that's intense and true-feeling. The performances are uniformly excellent, including that of the director himself, at once heightenedly dramatic and firmly anchored; it packs a heavy emotional punch, too. The film's no masterpiece, but it shows plenty.

My Blueberry Nights

Extracted from an email (one reference omitted; footnotes added):

It was pretty good, but not near his best earlier ones.[1] Very much his take on an 'American' film[2] - reminded me rather of Edward Hopper's paintings[3] - but still plenty languorous, romantic, moody, etc, etc.[4] Norah Jones did a good job![5] (Actually, he got good performances out of all of the leads - including a nice cameo from Cat Power.[6] Rachel Weisz probably the best but Natalie Portman also good as a raucous Vegas gambler.[7])

(w/ David and Wei)

* * *

[1] The framing story couldn't help but put me in mind of Chungking Express, in particular.
[2] Something was lost in the translation, I fear - My Blueberry Nights isn't as rapturous, as rhapsodic, as say 2046 or ITMFL, and the dialogue is, dare I say it, positively clunky in places.
[3] But more smeared and impressionistic - or do I mean expressionistic? I'm never quite sure with WKW's films.
[4] Albeit with some surprising grittiness in the David Strathairn/Rachel Weisz segment - which is graced by some seriously great acting from both of the above.
[5] In kind of a dreamy, wide-eyed, almost excessively ingenuous way, but she did it well, and that was the point of the character.
[6] A couple of songs from The Greatest, including the title track, made it on to the soundtrack, as did a nice cover of "Harvest Moon" by Cassandra Wilson; all quite nice but the music doesn't function in the same hot-wire-to-the-spine way as it does in, eg, Chungking Express.
[7] Jude Law the least dynamic but held his own...y'know, I don't mean to be too critical about the film, though - it was, for all that, still pretty captivating.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello

Wonderfully mounted animated short - genuine steampunk, with all the frills. The silhouette style works a treat, and goes well with the Victorian gothic elements as well as the tech-industrial trappings that come with the territory.

Stay

One of those perception-thrillers - a bit of star wattage in Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling (not to mention Bob Hoskins and Janeane Garofalo in smaller roles), and a dab hand with camera sleight of hand (which turns out to serve the underlying premise of the film rather neatly). The problem, of course, is that there are generally a limited number of ways that films of this nature can turn out, and Stay indeed reveals itself to be one of those familiar types by its end...still, it's not a cheat, and it's effective enough, so...

(also w/ Michelle at home, involving some slightly ridiculous measures to emulate the night-time ambience that she insisted the film needed while we watched it at 4 in the afternoon)

Southland Tales

A right mess, this - basically a totally incoherent and completely affectless cinematic diatribe against right-wing politics, consumerism and pop culture vacuousness (vacuity?), with a bit of space-time continuum rip into the bargain. Without question, the best thing about it is the Rock's performance, though you could star-spot to your heart's content with this one (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Justin Timberlake also prominent, to name just two).

(w/ Michelle - at home)

The First Emperor (Tan Dun)

The Nova's running a series of screenings of last and this season's performances of the New York Met opera; this one, focusing on the first emperor of Qin (sung by Placido Domingo, no less) and written by Tan Dun (among other things, the composer of the music for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), feels like a fusion of Chinese and western opera (not that I particularly know anything about either)...I enjoyed it! (And, somewhat surprisingly, found my heart beating faster than normal at several points.) Though it has to be said that the music never quite launched to a higher level...

(w/ Sara)

Hellboy & Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Michelle was all excited about the new one, based on its trailer (I've always been put off by the ridiculous-seemingness of Hellboy himself, but was persuadable given del Toro's and Ron Perlman's involvement), so we watched the first film on dvd and then, the following Friday night (and with Jarrod in tow), saw the sequel on the big screen.

The first one is really only okay - it has some great images and a sly sense of humour (and Jeffrey Tambor up its sleeve), but it's too uneven and has too many dull patches to succeed on any terms, even as a comic book adaptation (not that the bar is lower for such, but rather that the parameters for success are different). The sequel, while in a similar vein as the original, has a much more rapid-fire pace, both in terms of action sequences and jokes (it's laugh out loud hilarious at points), and is truly spectacular (it's hard to imagine del Toro's Hobbit as anything short of a resounding success) - it's rare to see such vividly imagined and rendered imagery deployed almost purely for the sake of entertainment in the service of an unashamed genre piece such as this, though I still find the basic lack of gravitas of Hellboy himself, as likeable and well realised a figure as he is, distracting, particularly when pitted against the epic scope of the film.

"Writing Melbourne"

Steven Carroll, seeming only to have about two different ideas about his novels, which he repeated at intervals (not a criticism, btw); Michelle de Kretser, elegantly and softly spoken; Toni Jordan, unpretentious and amusing on the subject of her novel Addition; and a Nick Gadd, who writes crime fiction with apparently something of a literary bent, but didn't make much of an impression - all on the subject of writing (about) Melbourne in its various incarnations and elements, and none particularly dealing with 'my' Melbourne...which was at least partly the point of the session as a whole.

(w/ Cassie)

The National - Alligator & Boxer

It's true - in Alligator and Boxer, the National have wrought something special, a pair of albums each imbued with whatever it is that sets a rock and roll record apart and marks it as something a little bit transcendent...as between the two, well, Alligator is pretty great, but it's Boxer that really amazes - I reckon Julian F got it exactly right when he called the record a future classic, because that's just what it sounds like. It has a resonance that can't be mistaken.

Every single song on Boxer is good, and it's perfectly sequenced, its individual tracks subtly reflecting and building upon each other as they go, the whole much more than the sum of the parts. The album leads off with one of its clear highlights, the downbeat anthem "Fake Empire", at once totally contemporary chamber-pop influenced indie rock and classicist synthesis of the several pop music strands to be heard wrapped up in its sound, and then kicks it with the propulsive surge of "Mistaken For Strangers" before rounding off its first suite with the one-two of the murky, lovely brood of "Brainy" (very different sounding from its immediate predecessor on the record, but wreathed in the same post-punk aesthetic) and "Squalor Victoria" 's faster-paced but equally haunted rockisms.

Then, Boxer's dark, velvet heart, "Green Gloves" and "Slow Show": the first mysterious, subterranean and never quite resolving; the second providing the payoff, its coda - "you know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you" - delivering one of the album's most apparently straightforward emotional payloads, yet in a way which still leaves one suspended somewhere between anticipation and resolution.

After that, "Apartment Story", another contemporary take on the Springsteen thing (see also "Keep The Car Running"), and done well, and then two deceptively low-key tracks, "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro", separated by probably the album's sprightliest moment (at least on purely musical terms), "Guest Room", which reminds me, it has to be said, of the handful of latter-day U2 songs that have held anything of the old magic (especially a couple of the better moments on All That You Can't Leave Behind), though if there's a stadium rock band's lp to which Boxer as a whole merits comparison, it's unquestionably R.E.M.'s New Adventures In Hi-Fi...anyhow, those two - "Start A War" and "Racing Like A Pro" - while not immediately memorable, turn out to be two of the deepest running songs on the record, and certainly two of those which I most commonly find echoing in my head...after which the band brings it home with the relaxed elegance of "Ada" and "Gospel", not stretching for anything over and above the rest of the album but instead finding the ideal way to wind things up in light of what has come before, on a gentle decline in which things continue to unfurl and re-ravel.

All told, it feels like there's a single thread running through the album - which has more than a little, I think, to do with the fact that it's the first album in ages that I've genuinely wanted to listen to over and over from start to finish (the last one before it was probably Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga once that one took root), and the first in even longer that I've felt like listening to in the dark, at night, with no distractions and nothing in my awareness except the music (the last couple having been, I reckon, Fox Confessor and In The Aeroplane... back in the first half of '06, or perhaps the Marie Antoinette soundtrack).

Alligator, which came before Boxer, can't help but suffer by comparison; despite, in "Abel" and "Mr November", housing the two most clarion songs to appear on either album, it feels a more muted record than that other, and it's certainly less perfect. Still, when it hits, it really hits - both of the abovementioned are great, and the jittery, catchy "Friend Of Mine" and the contemplative driftiness of "Daughters of the Soho Riots", not to mention the opening run of "Secret Meeting", "Karen" and "Lit Up", also stick indelibly...and I feel that it probably still has more room to grow on me, being that bit more understated and shadowy...

It strikes me that I haven't managed to say much about the National's sound on these two albums, but the truth is that their music has sunk in for me at a level which feels as if it has very little to do with the details of the sound itself - it's a tonal thing more than, say, a melodic or an instrumental one in particular...it's great, is what it comes down to - that's all.