"Children of Marx and Coca-Cola": Masculin féminin

Masculin féminin is a treat - the lightest and most amusing (though far from the most bemusing) Godard that I've yet seen, its impressionistic, disjointed take on Parisian youth culture in the 60s is delightful on every level. I wish I lived in the world of its characters.

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man - Out of Season

Ooh, this is rather lovely. It's from a few years back - Gibbons collaborating with the bassist from Talk Talk on a hushed set of low-key electro-acoustic folk/soul...pretty, melancholy, fraught, quietly sublime.

Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays

From FB:

Howard Choo is feeling Tennessee Williams.
18 April at 08:21

KB at 21:19 on 18 April
in a 'drunk on whiskey' way, or a 'pondering your fading youth/beauty' way?

Howard Choo at 22:33 on 23 April
More in a 'glass menagerie' way just now, but all of the above really.

There's no doubt about it - Tennessee Williams has gotten under my skin. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last year, and Sweet Bird of Youth, Streetcar and The Glass Menagerie in this Penguin compendium; it strikes a chord.

Brotherhood of the Wolf

Movies like this are rarely as good on a second viewing, but Brotherhood of the Wolf stands up pretty well. It's quite a lavish production, not merely in the costumes (18th C) but also in the settings and scenery and in the explosive fight scenes. Rainy and foreboding throughout, it's entertaining from the get-go, studded with charismatic performances and tense action sequences. Who knew that a French period martial arts quasi-werewolf blockbuster could be so good?

In Bruges

Liked this a fair bit. The unevenness is deliberate, I think, including the melding of genres, and its investment in its characters - Ken and Ray in particular - pays off (Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are both delightful). It has bursts of out and out violence - it's a film about hitmen, after all - interspersed with the character development, muted comedy, honest to goodness dramatic (in more than one sense) episodes and picture postcard shots of Bruges which make up the bulk of its running time, and all the bits more or less knit.

Asobi Seksu - Hush

Starts off sounding like a lost Cocteau Twins record circa Victorialand and picks up hints of the more crashing, surging elements of Citrus (see also here) thereafter, but remains basically true to its title - this is a more muted Asobi Seksu, though in most relevant respects a no less brilliantine one, and one which is still turning out basically the same kind of 21st C dream-pop-esque melodic fabric. It's a grower, but it improves with every listen.

Amanda Palmer - Who Killed Amanda Palmer?

Wickedly dramatic cabaret-pop with songs that lodge firmly in the mind - evinced by the fact that nearly all of them sounded familiar on my first listen, having evidently lingered somewhere in my mind since seeing her show a while back.

Plan 9 From Outer Space

Nowhere near as magnificently bad as I'd been led to expect, though the flying saucers were certainly suitably risible. (Still, having much enjoyed Burton's Ed Wood when I saw it a while back, much of which was concerned with the making of this one, added something.) M and I got a bit bored with it about halfway through and watched the rest on fast forward, which was much more enjoyable.

Hot Fuzz

Not as good as Shaun of the Dead, but not too bad, either. The satire is levelled as much at 'Englishness' as it is at cop action films, and it does a good job at holding the attention. Still, nothing to write home about.

"Define irony": Reality Bites

People were talking about Janeane Garofalo the other night, and it was that which put me in the mood to revisit Reality Bites, but - I must be honest here - when I last watched this film, somewhere in the latter part of high school (ie, probably about three or four years on from its 1994 release date), it was really all about Winona Ryder, my first movie star crush, and not one that I can find it in myself to feel any shame about at all.

I don't remember exactly where this film fit in with that particular story - after Heathers (which I'm fairly sure is where it all started) and possibly Edward Scissorhands but before Bram Stoker's Dracula, Beetlejuice, the Gillian Armstrong Little Women and How To Make An American Quilt I reckon (as to those last two, I can only plead a genuine cinematic crush) - but it was early on, at any rate. All wrapped up with that, too, and in some ways more significantly, Reality Bites was, for better or for worse, highly influential on me in terms of forming my ideas and hopes as to what grown up life would be like (the only other film to've had a similar influence on me at around that time was Love and Other Catastrophes, which I got to a bit later), at the very time when the then seemingly limitless potential of the world was just starting to open up for me (remember, dear reader, I was probably about 15 or 16 at the time).

...so, despite the eminent fashionability of sneering at this film for what might unkindly be characterised as its shallowness, its naivete, its lack of edge, I fully expected that revisiting it now would induce at least a twinge in me, not so much at its face value (though, let's be honest, some of that too), but for the nostalgia that it was likely to summon, for the 90s and for the time in my life when I first saw it, and that's just what it did; more than that, though, I was struck by how sweetly romantic it is, and if my receptiveness to that kind of tone is always going to fluctuate according to any number of factors (witness, in a different context, the see-sawing re: Garden State), well, I'm not troubled by that...and I think I've both realised and acknowledged that this one, Reality Bites, is an important signpost in my history, and so, so be it. I'm glad I've watched it again, now.

12 Monkeys

Gilliam does sci-fi; I recalled it as being visually spectacular, quixotically grotesque, and rather unsettling, all of which proved to remain true on a rewatch, though knowing in advance how all the pieces fit together takes some of the sting out.

"life changing, mind altering, breathtaking" (books)

...those being the criteria that someone I know (CL) came up with when I asked her for some parameters to her request for book recommendations (this being a person who I don't know well at all, either personality or lit tastes-wise). So this is what I came up with, off the cuff:

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

A series of graceful, poetic meditations on 'invisible cities' - imagined cities ostensibly visited by Marco Polo and then described by the great explorer in an extended philosophical conversation with Kublai Khan. I've never read anything else like it; to call it a 'novel' does its uniqueness a disservice.

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

A warning: Pynchon is certainly not for everyone! But Lot 49 is his most accessible book and probably his best, an absurdist, crazily unravelling and frequently, blackly hilarious postmodern detective story in which what is at stake is nothing less than the very possibility of communication, meaning and truth itself.

Haruki Murakami - Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

For mine, Murakami is the single writer to have best synthesised the competing urges and joys of 'literary' and 'genre' fiction to produce something wholly original and great. Hard-Boiled Wonderland is probably my favourite - it's clever, cool, lucid, heart-breaking, inspiring. It's about the nature of consciousness and how that relates to what we think of as reality; it's also a gripping adventure story.

Nicole Krauss - The History of Love

A more modest book than the others I've mentioned here, and also more recent, but a substantial one nonetheless. It deals with family, loss, and the nature of human connection, and it builds to an almost unbearably touching ending that literally induced chills down my spine in the final pages.

Andre Gide - The Counterfeiters (Les Faux-Monnayeurs)

Another that isn't for everyone, but The Counterfeiters is a masterpiece. Coolly amoral, ironically intellectual, acerbically witty - a French novel par excellence, but what a novel! Set in the early part of the 20th century, it follows a large cast of characters - schoolboys, intellectuals, artists, and co - as they mislead and misunderstand each other, all the while itself interrogating its own nature as a work of literature through a series of complex, interwoven metafictional gestures.

Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita

A riotous, generous satire of life in Stalinist Russia. Its main narrative involves the coming to Moscow of the Devil at his most urbane, with accomplices including a heavy-drinking, chess-playing black cat, and the social havoc that he then wreaks amongst polite society; that's intercut with a parallel retelling of the story of Christ and Pontius Pilate and with an epic love story. All the Big Themes, in other words - religion, art, love, politics, etc - but it's extremely readable and very funny.

The Year of Magical Thinking (MTC)

This one didn't quite take with me - it's ferociously intelligent, and quite impassionedly so at times, but I think possibly too far removed from my own experience to hit home, and also, insofar as it is a play (and doing my best to take it on its own terms, as always), it's not the kind of play that I really like. A 90 minute monologue, leavened only by some movement by the speaker, Robyn Nevin, between the rows of chairs laid out on the stage which comprise the set, and on-off lighting and sound effects from time to time, and on the subject of grief and how we might deal with it (or fail to do so), by way of Joan Didion's coolly anguished account of the sudden death of her husband and the more gradual decline of their daughter, it's well mounted and performed (Nevin is strong) but didn't enthrall or involve me as it might have wished to.

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

Heat

Neither as searing nor as epic as it wants to be (a two and a half hour running time notwithstanding), but has its moments. I'm not sure I've ever seen a cops and robbers film that I thought attained true greatness, and while this had many of the trappings (exciting action sequences, slow-burn build-ups, lavish attention devoted to a large cast, some spectacular framing of shots), for me it never really caught alight.

Lovely Loneliness

Another at the Spanish 'La Mirada' film festival, and a nice one. The description in the program made it sound like Amelie in Buenos Aires, and that turned out to be not far from the mark, though Lovely Loneliness is less whimsical and has more of an air of reality to it; indeed, in its pacing and informally episodic structure, not to mention the generally drab and everyday nature of the settings, the film would veer close to the social realist/documentary school of film-making that I so dislike were it not for its mildly offbeat tone, and particularly the quirkiness of its protagonist, the delightfully-named Soledad. I actually felt that she was quite a realistic female character, if perhaps a touch exaggerated - I saw elements of NV (with whom I was watching it), M and TV in particular in her, which has had some effect on how I would respond to those elements when next they're apparent in women I actually know, I suspect.

It's a bit difficult to essay a plot synopsis...it would go something like: girl breaks up with boy, has blocked toilet. Girl meets another boy, has awkward courtship with boy, boy fixes blocked toilet. Girl is a hypochondriac who goes to hospital at night a lot, gets locked out of her apartment at one point. Boy is in process of moving house. Things seem to go well with girl and new boy. (Also, mother of girl gets breast enhancement surgery, for no apparent reason related to anything else.) But it is pretty charming in a low-key way.

Camino

When Steph emailed Nicolette and I about checking out some films at the Spanish 'La Mirada' film festival and described this one as a tear-jerker, I didn't realise that she meant it quite so literally, but tears proved to be exactly what it produced.

The premise has a worrying potential for mawkishness and manipulativeness - an 11 year old girl (Camino) falls sweetly in love as it becomes increasingly apparent that she's terminally ill - but what gives the film bite, and a lot of its heaviness, is the intensity of her (Catholic) faith and the way that plays out around her family, particularly her unswervingly devout mother. The anti-humanistic and frankly inhumane nature of much of that version of Catholic doctrine espoused by Opus Dei comes through strongly, and the fantasy sequences reflecting her inner landscape while dreaming or under anaesthesia during the gruellingly-depicted surgery are memorable and powerful, highlighting the heightenedness and terror that Camino's belief in Jesus, the Virgin, her guardian angel and the whole pantheon (so to speak) induces in her imaginative life.

Manipulative though it at times seemed, the fact remains that, over its two and a half hours, Camino caused several of the most poised people I know to do some serious crying (at least if the red eyes and flushed, blotchy faces were anything to judge by), and speaking for myself, its impact is undeniable. I'm going to recommend it left, right and centre, without being in any hurry to repeat the experience myself.

(w/ Steph, Nicolette and Michelle; Hugh M and Eleanor M-H also there, and we also saw Kristian I and Gia)

Siri Hustvedt - The Sorrows of an American

Re-reading this (for book club), I was struck by the prominence of the theme of trauma within it, which led to the realisation of how elegantly it - trauma - and possibly the other key thing that The Sorrows of an American is about, absence, are entwined and related in this still remarkable novel, namely the notion that trauma, whether experienced personally or as a reverberation from the past or from society at large, is the foundation - the precondition - of everything that is apparently whole for its characters, not least the narratives through which they make sense of their lives and selves, which of course maps precisely on to the manner in which that which is present is always enabled only by what is absent, lacking, unspoken.

This book is so good that it takes my breath away a little. Comparing it to The Echo Maker, say, with which it has more than a bit in common (it even mention's Capgras syndrome and Libet's readiness potential experiment, the latter of which has been weirdly recurrent in my reading lately, having also been central to the Dennett extract we did for philo reading group a while back), I'm reminded again of how ineffable and how clear is the whatever-it-is that separates the really good stuff from all the rest.

(Last time.)

Lucinda Williams @ Hamer Hall, Arts Centre, Thursday 2 April

One of those tremendously satisfying, 'total'-feeling shows. I'd actually been in two minds about going, mainly because, relative to the tremendously high bar set by her earlier records, I'd been thinking that Williams' last three records have been kind of underwhelming (more on that later), but I'm really glad that I did, not least because she drew on nearly the whole of her back catalogue (only her debut, Ramblin', was left unrepresented by at least two or three songs) in putting together her two and a bit hour set - at one point, she said that she was trying to fit as many songs in as possible, and that's how it felt, even though each individual song had plenty of room to breathe...

I still haven't listened to her first two albums (the abovementioned Ramblin' and Happy Woman Blues - both, I might mention in passing, released before I was born), but here's how I tend to think of the others:

There's Car Wheels, a flat-out classic, and at this point almost dead centre in her recording history - and then there's Essence, which came next and sounds entirely different from its predecessor while also being genuinely great. Before those two, the self-titled record that she referred to as her Rough Trade album throughout the show (presumably to avoid the awkwardness of saying 'this song's from my Lucinda Williams' album) and Sweet Old World, both wonderful and both absolutely critical to my overall sense of 'Lucinda'; and after the pivotal pair of Car Wheels and Essence, three solid but unmemorable albums which haven't made anywhere near the impression on me that the others have, World Without Tears, West and Little Honey. (Also, the live record.)

Laid out like that, it has something of the pattern of a slightly asymmetrical bell curve - the joys of the earlier records followed by the heights of the middle two in turn followed by a tapering off in more recent times. But I kind of suspect that my responses can be at least partially explained on personal grounds, rather than being referable to any intrinsic quality of the albums (except insofar as the time at which they were released can be said to be intrinsic to them); looking back at my initial impressions of West, for example, I'm surprised to see that at the time I was excited enough about it to suggest that it might be close to her best...perhaps, then, it's really with the passage of time that those earlier ones have loomed so increasingly large.

This all came through a fair bit in her live show. The fact that she was doing songs from nearly all of her albums, each of which has quite a different sound from the others due to the vagaries of song-writing style, instrumentation, production, etc, with the same country-edged rock and roll band, and in the style that she has arrived at in this, her graceful oldish age (she's pretty darn spry, and in pretty great voice, for a 56 year old), which had the effect of effacing some of the divisions between the various albums which hold such sway in my mind; in so doing, her set made it clear that the her song-writing has remained very consistent right up to the present day, not only in quality but also in style and motifs. Indeed, some of the highlights - I'm thinking of the epic "Little Rock Star" and the blast of "Come On" - came from those more recent albums...songs which I'd always previously given fairly short shrift.

That said, as I started off by kind of saying, what I really wanted to hear were songs from that five album Lucinda Williams-Essence run, and it was those which really made the show for me; she rocked a lot of them pretty hard, did others in more pensive style, and even pulled out an acoustic "Passionate Kisses" sans band. It was really quite something, a reminder and affirmation of her talent and brilliance.

(w/ M)

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

A witty melange of genres, if still kinda disposable. Funnest bit: Val Kilmer's turn as a tough-guy gay private detective.