Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I think the age of the franchise shows with this one - it's high-spirited enough, but really only sorta fun and not particularly exciting at all.

The Prestige

Though he's not particularly flashy, I think that Christopher Nolan may be one of the best writer/directors going around. The comment about non-flashiness may seem an odd one to make about the guy who did Memento (The Prestige isn't exactly a straight-up concoction either), but the impression I get from watching his films (the abovementioned two, plus Insomnia and the Batman ones) is that Nolan's a consummate craftsperson; amidst all the cinematic legerdemain that highlights the films he makes, there's a rock solid technique and understanding of the basics. Watching The Prestige a second time reinforced that; knowing the architecture of the film in advance gave me a far better appreciation of the aptness of the choices that he makes at each stage, be they casting (Bowie and Andy Serkis - genius), camera angles, lighting, music or other...

(previously - and here)

"In reflection"

Kim's masters recital, at St John's church in Southgate tonight:

Sonatine - D. Milhaud
Le Merle Noir - O. Messiaen
Toward the Sea III - T. Takemitsu
And then I knew twas wind - T. Takemitsu
Trio Sonate - C. Debussy

(I particularly liked the Milhaud - jazzy and wry - and the Debussy.)

Slow Down Tallahassee - The Beautiful Light

Every bit the gem that the cd single suggested a full length would be, The Beautiful Light starts at a furious pace, its first three numbers, "The Beautiful Light", "Down The Alleyway" and a slightly retooled "Candy" (the other two songs from the single, "So Much For Love" and "UR Grace UR", also reappear in rerecorded form later on the album), all breakneck, utterly taut, two-and-a-half to three minute power-pop epics; they slow it down for fourth track "Never Be Lonely Again", which brings the girl group elements of their sound to the fore, and at about that point on first listen, I was thinking greatness. The rest of the album doesn't really come near to following through on the promise of that initial rush (as far as albums of this kind go, I think it's shaded by We Are The Pipettes, but the high points are equally high, which is saying something; by comparison to the other, by the way, Slow Down Tallahassee are less glossy, and have a more garage-y sound), but there are plenty of ideas scattered through the balance, and there's no shortage of melodies and hooks to love, either.

Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther

Maybe it's just a reflection of my listening habits and preferences, but I find the music on this album difficult to categorise; it sounds a bit like a lot of things, but taken all together, its sound and effect are hard to distill. What can I say? It's a pop record, warm, contemplative and sometimes melancholic, copping licks from Virgin Suicides-era am radio by way of Fleetwood Mac, Belle & Sebastian-styled folk, and Sufjan at his (not particularly rockin') most rock, but dressed up in today's threads, not least in the crystalline, organic-sounding production. It's not a concoction that ought necessarily appeal to me, but appeal it does - the songcraft is hard to deny, as are the songs.

Jolie Holland - The Living and the Dead

Admittedly, it's the time of year when I fall for this kind of music, but Jolie Holland is seriously really good, and The Living and the Dead sees her bringing it in a sprightly vein which I find delightful. My faves are probably the most straight up country-rockers - opening trio "Mexico City", "Corrido Por Buddy" and "Palmyra", and "Your Big Hands" - which are the kinds of songs to which I dance when no one's around (today, in the sunshine outside while I was supposed to be hanging out the washing, with the album cued up on my ipod); if I'm already feeling light, they make me feel lighter, and if not, then they give me that sense of having a small something in my chest, tugging upwards, making me feel at once happy and sad. Overall, not as strong a record as Springtime Can Kill You, but it gives me something different from that other, and it's some good anyway.

Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism & Plans

These're pretty nice; I like Transatlanticism more, but both are very listenable, and I don't mind the airy kinda mellow-pop sorta indie-rock (intimate/grand) thing at all, though it's not really where I'm at just now. They're kind of still a bit undifferentiated for me, though (see previous) - maybe one or both will really hit home later down the track.

Terry Pratchett - The Fifth Elephant

Maybe it's a chicken and egg thing, or maybe not, but Pratchett seems to loom large in the reading history (and, in many cases, present day reading habits) of a remarkable number of people who I know - or make that the circles in which I move, maybe. Anyhow, I popped into the secondhand bookstore on Scotchmer St ("Already Read"?) the other weekend, while the photo shoot was going on at home, and saw that someone had obviously recently offloaded a large number of Pratchett paperbacks (it looked to be close to a complete collection); I wondered whether they'd also been responsible for the several consecutive Sandmans I noticed in the window. I happily picked up three of the few that I didn't already own, and was amused to see the person before me at the counter - female, early middle aged, very North Fitzroy - also had an armful. The man's made his mark.

(Anyway, so I also re-read The Fifth Elephant over the last few days...yeah.)

(a propos - last time)

Virginia Woolf - Street Haunting

In Tamara's words - this was a gift from her of a while back - a slight portion of Woolf, but a pleasing selection nonetheless. Part of the delightful pocket series put out by Penguin a while back in honour of their 70th birthday, it contains six story-vignettes (the line between fiction and personal essay is blurred in most of them) in characteristic style. As is usual with writers better known for their longer form prose, the pieces here have a different feel from her novels - they're less weighty (which is hardly surprising), and seem less perfectly formed and rounded off (which is perhaps less predictable, but may - I don't know - have something to do with the circumstances of their composition) ... there are some tendencies towards over-preciousness, perhaps - writing from the perspective of a snail, for example - and some unexpected, but (not that I've thought about it) not entirely inapt, resonances of Emily Dickinson in places, too.

Sparrow

Steph got it right when she said afterwards that this, running as part of the Johnnie To retrospective at acmi, was a cheeky film - it has an insouciance and a wit which is legible in its dialogue, cinematography, music and general tone. Interestingly, that cheekiness is less apparent in the plot, which is admirably economical: a close-knit quartet of pickpockets find themselves targeted after stealing from the wrong person, and then become entangled with a beautiful woman who is herself enmeshed with a very powerful and none too scrupulous man, leading to the marvellous set piece climax in which the two groups stalk through the dark, rainy city, umbrellas and concealed razor blades in hand, engaged in a high stakes pickpocketing contest. It moves quickly and lightly, with a bit of a Hitchcockian flavour, and gives us a happy ending - much fun.

(w/ Steph (and her friend Allen), Kai and Michelle)

Emiliana Torrini @ the Forum, Tuesday 18 November

I haven't listened to much of Torrini's stuff - really only Fisherman's Woman, though I noticed the other night that I also have Love in the Time of Science on my ipod, without being entirely sure how it got there - and this show turned out to be pleasingly both as I expected and a bit different again; in amongst the glistening, folksy, quasi-lullaby type tunes that I really associate her with (which made up a solid half or so of the set - of those, "Today Has Been Okay" particularly stood out), there was a variety of more electronic and even rock-edged numbers, many of which provided the show's highlights. Torrini herself was charming, too, telling stories in a pronounced Icelandic lilt (often with a liberal dose of profanity), giggling, and generally engaging the audience between songs.

So, mm, it was nice; among other things, it's left "Nothing Brings Me Down" in my head for much of today.

(I didn't get the name of the support act, but they weren't bad - modestly epic indie chamber-rock in the vein of Gersey.)

(w/ Michelle)

Renegade

A western, I guess, but as much an exploration of alternative consciousness (primarily via psychotropic substances) as a genre piece, leading to some beautiful cinematography, though I didn't get much else out of it, Vincent Cassel, Michael Madsen and Juliette Lewis notwithstanding.

Hard Candy

Stylish and fairly effective, but I was left feeling that this could have been so much better - I found it unsatisfying, in the end, mainly because, in attempting to follow through on the promise of its initial moves, it ended up losing some of the conciseness that gets it off to such a good start. I did think, though, that it had the courage to follow through on the implications of its premise, which is always admirable.

"Houwa"

[19/11, 4pm]

It's funny how films (and other such things) can come to inhabit us.

Yesterday, Penny happened to mention in an email that she started watching All About Lily Chou-Chou the other night and that she hadn't quite fallen for its dreamy detachment; triggered by that, I expect, I just caught myself sitting here at my desk at work with music from the soundtrack running through my head and a tightness in my chest and feeling of sadness that come straight from the film itself. It doesn't go away, I guess.

Further update / "Idiotic plot twists"

Still on track with nanowrimo, by the way: 23,421 words and with a whole weekend ahead of me - listening to the New Pornographers and enjoying the sunshine, I feel good about it.

I was just browsing the forums on the website, and came across a topic headed "Idiotic plot twists". Here are some of my favourites that people have seen fit to put up from their own current efforts, and their current word counts according to the website widget thing:

* * *

i just had a small localized mobile black hole try to eat my character for the sake of wordcount.

[50,107]

* * *

they found a way to turn people inside out and tried it on my MC...

[615,839 - I am dubious about this word count, btw]

* * *

a character is freaking out over a file which i have just decided contains nothing of any importance at all. He nearly crashed a van in the process.
Meanwhile, my MC is living in a half occupied house (one of the occupants hasnt been seen since chapter 3) with a twelve year old girl who obviously is a nutcase and a talking bird who just emailed the MC's mum and is a major suspect in his abduction. And he doesnt realise anythings wrond despite waking up in a room full of mousetraps.

[21,395]

* * *

My characters found a duck.

No, I'm not kidding.

In a post-apocolyptic world where they have only seen a few species of animals twenty years after the world died, they found a duck. Random duck, right before the beginning of the funeral of their most important leader in history. So what did they do with said duck?

They debated eating it.

But then eventually decided to follow it back to the duck nest to see if there were more; they almost missed the funeral cause they were too busy watching the fluffy little ducklings run around all awkward-like.

[35,616]

* * *

My MC just got rescued from slave traders by a bunch of talking moles. Why? I couldn't tell you. Where the talking moles come from in a story where NO OTHER ANIMALS have spoken a word or been given a voice of any sort, beats me.

[16,182]

* * *

Lol I totally just like Stuck in this random dog and forgot about it, literally, the dog no longer exists in my story, poof gone without explanation.

[20,034 - hey, I actually did this too, though I could never have described it in such hilarious fashion. Also, I have hopes that the dog may reappear in some more or less significant fashion...]

* * *

Clearly animals play a big part in this kind of thing - or maybe they're just the ones that particularly appeal to me...

Stranger Than Fiction

This movie is neat, and much more low-key than I'd expected, given the premise (Will Ferrell discovers that he's actually a character in a book being written by a famous novelist who is slated to die and then attempts to find said author to convince her not to kill him). Ferrell's damn good (a la Carrey in The Truman Show and, of course, Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love), Emma Thompson as the scruffy, overwrought, death-fixated writer is simply brilliant (particularly given that I last saw her in Brideshead, a completely different role), Dustin Hoffman plays a literature professor who's like a straighter version of his character in Huckabees with characteristic understated aplomb, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is as much of a charmer as ever in hitting the nail on the head with her depiction of an independent-minded harvard drop out cookie baker; the film bubbles along but it's both morally and emotionally serious, and finely crafted too. A minor gem.

Punch-Drunk Love

Yep, I got it right the first time. This movie is great. Also, struck by the way that all of the still shots - I'm thinking particularly of the ones showing Barry, motionless on the street near the start of the film - are framed and shot like photographs, and gorgeously colour and shadow-drenched ones at that. Paul Thomas Anderson is some kind of brilliant.

1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

Sunny presented this handsome book to me a while back; I've worked through it (or bits of it) in two ways, namely reading the entries for films that interest me (from the end of the book towards the beginning - ie, from most recently made to oldest) and, with Michelle, going from the beginning and counting how many I've seen (for the record, 134). A lot of my favourites in here; as well as several that I really didn't think much of at all. Very nice!

Arvo Pärt - A Portrait

And still more; still magnificent. Interesting to hear some bits of the symphonies, too - quite a different kettle of fish from the rest of his stuff that I've heard, but there are some clear resonances connecting them, too.

"Jump Into Fall" (IMP September 2008)

Hella fun, this one - one of the best I've received yet through IMP - and proof that good things come to those who wait on more than one count. Most particularly, I've been hearing about Lykke Li and wanting to hear her, and "Let It Fall" lives up to the hype, a sparse, catchy, slightly fragile scando-pop thing in the vein of "Be Mine!", "Chewing Gum" &c, and totally delicious; also, I've been hearing about MGMT and was glad to hear "Indie Rokkers", a buzzy, moody, somewhat M83-meets-Arcade Fire-esque number that I like rather a lot.

Actually, the shadow of the AF hangs over several of the songs on the mix, most notably French Kicks' "Abandon" and the Handsome Furs' "Dead + Rural", both of which I also like. Elsewhere: the strangely funky (plus Bowie-eque bridge-featurin') "No One Does It Like You" by a group called Department of Eagles, which kicks things off and got totally stuck in my head the other day; Santogold's "I'm A Lady", groove and melody in equal parts (which I like in part because, not despite, the start-of-chorus hook is almost identical to that of "West End Girls"); the gleeful loopiness-tempered-with-real-pop-smarts of tracks like Ferraby Lionheart's "A Crack In Time", Elk City's "Loz Crusados" and Chairlift's "Evident Utensil" (a particular fave); the Carps' "All The Damn Kids" and Cut Off Your Hands' "You and I" bringing a bit of post-punk infused scuzzy modern indie rock (likewise, in a different way, the Maccabees' "First Love"); the anthemic surge of American Names" by Sebastien Grainger, well placed near the end; and a number of others, none of which fail to leave an impression.

(from Vina in New York City, NY)

The Dark Knight

Back when this was having its theatrical run proper, everyone was talking about it. At the time, I wondered what it was that had created such excitement - one part the Heath factor, one part it being the next instalment in a blockbuster franchise that had been re-energised with the first Nolan entry, and (probably) one part the actual quality of the film, I was thinking. Anyway, it's really seriously good - dark in a gritty, morally ambiguous (and, I'm inclined to think, ambivalent) way rather than in the (admittedly fun) baroque, gothic fashion of the Burton instalments, and viscerally exciting as well as genuinely intelligent. Lots of great turns, too - Bale really inhabits the character, and the others aren't far behind (loved the William Fichtner cameo in particular). The extent to which it and Batman Begins fit together as a single work is impressive, too.

(w/ Steph and Sunny @ IMAX)

Scarlett Thomas - Bright Young Things

Edgy, extremely readable and rather pleasing, if fairly insubstantial and well short of what was to come in the form of PopCo and The End of Mr Y. I think that Annie is pretty clearly the 'Scarlett' character in this one; I guess she was the one with whom I most identified, too, though I suppose I must reluctantly admit that there may be a certain amount of Jamie there too (Paul's not ridiculous either, but clearly further off than either of those other two; Thea, Emily and Bryn, in the meantime, are right off the radar as far as that particular game goes). Yup, pretty cool.

Terry Pratchett - Jingo

A reread, natch. I'm a bit surprised that I apparently haven't read it since at least before 1 Jan 2005, but I guess there are a lot of Pratchetts out there.

Update

(from an email to kb)
* * *

Well, the non-work part of my life has been practically taken over by
nanowrimo. I'm on track! The target's 50,000 words in a month, working
out at 1,667 words per day - and I just broke 20,000 last night, so it's
looking good. (No comment as to the quality of the novel, natch.) I'm
handing over to Tamara after she finishes her exams on the 20th, so only
a bit over a week to go...I do believe that there will be PIRATES.

Howard

P.S., I finally caved in and joined facebook - though I hope to at least
stick sufficiently to my principles that only my 'real friends' also
become 'facebook friends'!

Interruption

Having a go at NaNoWriMo at present - the plan is for me to do it until Tamara finishes her exams, round the 20th or 22nd I think, and then hand over to her - so updates here will be irregular or, more likely, non-existent, till that's over with. (Up to 10,241 words as of right now - need to've done 13,336 by the end of today in order to be on track - I've been trying to do the solid 1,666 per day required but got a bit behind over the second half of the week.)

Burn After Reading

Of the other Coen brothers films I've seen, Fargo must be the closest in tone to this, their latest. Like that other, it's loosely grounded in genre but enfolds within itself disparate and weird elements - spy, caper, crime, domestic drama, slapstick, absurdist and black comedy, etc - and while it's not as moving as Fargo oddly was, it's funny and leaves one with a good feeling. Much of the humour comes from the nous with which the characters are played - Malkovich, Clooney and Pitt are particularly good at conveying nuance (often nuances of idiocy and gormlessness), but Frances McDormand isn't much shaded, while Tilda Swinton has less to work with but, as usual, pulls her weight (lookin' very Julia Gillard, incidentally!). So, a good one.

(w/ Michelle)

"Country Influenced" (IMP August 2008)

The country influence is pretty nominal in the case of some of these songs, but not being a purist, I'm willing to pay it as an overall mix. Unsurprisingly, a fair few that I already knew (7 of 20 - from Neko Case, Wilco, Beth Orton, Rilo Kiley, Radiohead, k.d. lang and Camera Obscura) and lots of other familiar artists (Patty Griffin, Decemberists, Hem, Springsteen, etc), and the rest are nice too.

(from Scott in Cary, NC)

Book club II (ongoing) / Michael Ondaatje - Divisadero (extremely belated)

Of course, the other one's still going, in fits and starts, and possibly somewhat against the odds given its origins in MS, but nonetheless! The ledger so far (all dates approx.):

• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (July 2006 - at Bluestone)
  
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell & Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote (October or maybe November 2006; a split book club after voting divided the then members almost right down the middle - at Lounge upstairs)
  
• Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (March 2007 - at Aloi Na)
  
• Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje (late 2007 - at Nicolette's)
  
• Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan (March 2008 - at Breizoz (the creperie on Gertrude St))
  
• An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke (August 2008 - at Nicolette's)

Next up, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

In its current incarnation, the other members are basically Nicolette (convenor), Tamara, Kathleen and Bec P...

* * *

Also, it seems I never wrote up Divisadero! It was so long ago now that many of the details elude me, but I did like it. I recall it as being rather literary (Stendhal references and all), but also pretty real - genuine characters and emotional impact and all that, and with mood to burn, too.