A Life of Possibilities

So it sounds like the second Dismemberment Plan show might have been even better than the first. 23 songs! A double encore! I dearly loved the show I got to see, but I'm kinda jealous...

For Your Listening Pleasure

A couple more Bjork songs from the new record for you. "Innocence" is pretty wack (and I mean that in the best possible way).

Oh Fine, Mom. How’s Washington?

It’s nice to be back in town, which, in comparison to even the most laid-back, residential parts of Brooklyn feels suburban, even Southern, like the sleepy, sunny small-town Florida I grew up in. Cars clutter the roads and most of the city is designed for driving rather than foot traffic. A few months ago, this seemed perfectly normal, a basic convenience, even a right. Now it looks like a luxury. I can see why longtime New Yorkers take issue with car ownership, especially the hulking SUVs that lumber down so many suburban back roads. It’s appalling to the shoe-and-subway ethos of much of New York’s population. It reminds me, in some ways, of the in-the-city snobbery residents inside the District displays toward those in Virginia and Maryland—a combination of genuine pride in one’s city and justification for/reaction to paying higher rents for smaller apartments and higher crime rates. (I run into the same city/boroughs snootiness in New York, of course, but so far it seems less common than similar city/suburb sentiments in D.C.).

This song played at DC9 last night after the Dismemberment Plan show. I guess they knew I was there.

Post D-Plan ... Post

First reaction: Wow, that was awesome.

Second reaction, after time for reflection: Yes, still completely awesome. Maybe even more so.

Brief summary: Set was appropriately heavy on tracks from Emergency & I (the band's best and most loved album); all the major songs got played: "Girl O'Clock," "Life of Possibilities," "Time Bomb," "Pay for the Piano," "You are Invited," "Ice of Boston," "Doin' the Standin' Still," "The City," and, of course, the ultimate live indie dance song, "Gets Rich." Ass-shaking galore. Only song I would've liked to see added was the rarity "The First Anniversary of Your Last Phone Call."

As per tradition, the kids crowded onto the stage for a big happy dance-a-long to "Ice of Boston." Inter-song banter included obligatory (but very worthwhile) thanks to J. Robbins and references to his son's disease as well as discussion (and sampling/sharing!) of "porn cake." This would be a cake with a scantily clad (PG-13) lady on it. No kidding.

Set lasted about 1:40. To sum up: Indie rock + dancing + porn cake = total musical awesomeness. I had a couple of drinks, but the buzz tonight was pure nostalgia for the band that threw the hip-shakinest, most crazy-fun indie rock dance parties in the country for a solid decade. Fun doesn't even begin to cover it.

Update: Excellent photos from the show here.

What It All Comes Down To

It’s Friday, it’s raining, and I’m headed to D.C. to see the Dismemberment Plan. Heck yeah!

Art House Tolerance

I've been remiss on blogging here. Again. It's probably going to happen a lot. But I couldn't miss the chance to post what is undoubtedly the most amazing sentence -- in all sorts of ways -- to grace the pages of the New York Times in the last few days:

“Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it’s doubtful they want to look at a stallion’s erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom, at least in public.”

Manohla Dargis, I think you may have a point. So to speak.

We Are the Sharp Shooters

The new Bjork song, "Earth Intruders," is out. Why aren't you listening to it?

The video leaked online too, but right now all copies seem to have been taken down.

A Thought on Writing

Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and use the word "ultimately" in one of your final paragraphs. But that still doesn't make it OK.

Fracture Review

I've got a review of the new Anthony Hopkins thriller up at NRO today:

In the courtroom thriller Fracture, Anthony Hopkins stars as an engineer with a gift for finding a structure’s tiniest, most difficult-to-spot weak points. You don’t need to be much of expert in anything, though, to see the myriad flaws in the movie. Smart thrillers are all about carefully constructed story, and this one is built about as solidly as a North Korean skyscraper — it’s a wonder it manages to hold up at all.

Read the whole thing.

OK. Awesome

Giant squirrels rapping a Wordsworth poem. And they're, like, kinda good.

Needless to say, they're British.

Me VS. Nine Inch Nails

I'm probably the first conservative pundit ever to have something positive to say about Nine Inch Nails -- but of course, not too positive.

What to make of Trent Reznor?

Since the release of "Pretty Hate Machine" in 1989, Mr. Reznor, the frontman and creative force behind the gloomy techno-rock outfit Nine Inch Nails, has raised hell with parents by serving as an icon to sullen teenagers whose taste in clothes runs to black, black and more black.

With his virulent, profanity-laced tirades against Christianity, suburban conformity and whatever else irritates teen outcasts at any given moment, he has become an established voice of rage for the juvenile and surly, teaching a new generation of rebels how to be "different" (just like all the other "different" youths).

Now he's back again with "Year Zero," another foray into angst and attitude, flipping off and showing off with Bush bashing and religion trashing. It ought to be easy to dismiss Mr. Reznor as no more than another grumbling rocker cashing in on the perpetual disaffection of youth -- except that he also happens to be one of the most uniquely talented musicians in mainstream music.

Doublethink, Spring Issue

While I sit on my couch and contemplate the various tastes and textures of cold-phlegm, let me encourage you to take a look at the new issue of Doublethink. Movie fans, as I believe this site has a few, will enjoy Project Greenlight winner Erica Beeney's piece "Words on the Big Screen." Also,
Bill Goodwin's story about life as a party clown is particularly strange and wonderful, and for a more personal perspective on one of the blogosphere's A-listers, check out Cheryl Miller's profile of Megan McArdle, aka, Jane Galt. Of course, you should just read the whole thing -- or better yet, subscribe. (If you're in D.C. tomorrow night, stop by the writer's party at the Science Club. Sadly, the whole living-in-NY thing will prevent me from attending.)

That Old Drippy Feeling

At some point, I want to respond to Matt Zoller Seitz’s statement about Quentin Tarantino, “What I want from Tarantino is a palpable, identifiable sense of what he believes, about life on this earth, about how people interact with one another, that is identifiable apart from the quotations from film history.” There's a real answer to that. But the point at which that answer comes is not going to be today. No, it won’t be today nor any other day in which I feel certain that some malevolent force snuck into my house, filled my brain with oatmeal and maple syrup and sealed my ears. Yes, I’ve got a severe case of the drips and the sniffles, the kind where one’s only choice—or at least my only choice—for the day way has been to spend it wrapped up in blankets on my couch watching bad television and trying to remember what it feels like to think thoughts unimpeded by a giant cloud of brain-crushing, thought-killing mush.

So I caught up on Lost and was pleasantly surprised by how interesting the last few episodes were. I caught up on 24 and was disappointed by how listless the last few weeks have been, and now I’m watching the new Tim Minear show, Drive. The concept is sort of Death Race 2000 meets Battle Royale meets Lost, but so far, not as good, or even as awesomely bad, as any of them. The main problem is that every character aside from Nathan Fillon and the crazy mom is irritating and unappealing. If the show were mainly about Fillon, I’d be in, but his performance just isn’t good enough to make the half dozen other painfully bad subplots worth watching.

Be My Friend, Obama?

At NRO, I've got a piece on Obama's Facebook cult today...

In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.” If that’s true, then no man, or at least no politician, has grown as much in recent months as Barack Obama.

Of course, when Emerson wrote the line, a “friend” was still likely to be someone you’d met in person, and the word itself was still a noun. These days, a “friend” might be any random Internet onlooker, and the verb “to friend” has surfaced on our lexicon’s fringes. Social-networking websites like Facebook and MySpace have made “friending” so easy as to be meaningless, and have established the Internet “friend count” as a status symbol. Politicians have always been at the forefront of the fake-friend game, so it’s hardly surprising that all of the top-tier 2008 presidential candidates are using social-networking sites to reach out to prospective voters. But while all the contenders have come to play in the online sandbox, it is Obama who has reaped the most rewards.

Obama’s social-network campaigning is unmatched, with more than double the MySpace “friends” of any other candidate, as well as thousands more Facebook messages and a customized social-networking site of his own. In these online communities, the barriers between politician and citizen are reduced, and the formal conventions of politics dissolve amidst the casual protocols of IMs and text messages. Instead of showing up on a field to wave signs from a distance, Obama’s Internet fans come to hang out, to chat, to talk about themselves and their lives, to send “virtual gifts”—in other words, to be Obama’s friend.

This Place is Dead Anyway

I don't particularly understand it myself, but the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank, is freaking fantastic. I mean, holy crap. Modest Mouse is usually so mediocre...

Worth Noting

This House Next Door essay on The Sopranos' place in gangster film history manages to reference both David Brooks and George Will. Almost hard to believe there's only 9 more episodes left...

Disturbing Revelation

After reading David Edelstein, I really think I'm the only person that prefers From Dusk Till Dawn to Grindhouse (although if you cut out Planet Terror, I'd probably put them nearly at a tie, with the caveat that they're totally different types of pictures). Maybe it's because FDTD does a better job of being actually wildly bad rather than awkwardly imitating wildly bad.

Fassbinder's Despair at MoMA

Last night, I headed into town for a short visit to MoMA and a screening of Fassbinder’s Despair. Senses of Cinema describes the film simply by putting it in a clump of Fassbinder work that it calls “increasingly garish.” I’d say that’s about an accurate a two-word review of the film as you’re going to get. Going in, I knew basically nothing of Fassbinder and even less of Despair. Scripted by Tom Stoppard, it’s an odd work, stagy, overcooked, full of absurd comic menace; it’s not quite right to call it ludicrous, but it’s in the vicinity.

It’s a story of a well-to-do but thoroughly mad chocolatier (shades of Willy Wonka?) who begins to hallucinate a double, most often while have sex with his pigeon-brained slut of a wife. He sees his own face on a drifter, convinces the drifter to help him commit a crime, and then, after dressing the drifter in his own clothes, shoots him, thinking that others will find the drifter and believe it to be him (they do not). Stoppard squeezes in some clever wordplay here and there, and there’s an enjoyably manic quality to the production, which plays on the protagonist’s madness with its willful disregard for audience expectations. Still, it’s an odd duck, at best a spectacle of stylized mania, but more often just a thin curiosity.

MoMA’s theater is large and comfortable, with ample legroom and good sightlines; it feels more like a theater at which you’d see plays at a medium sized college. The audience was, I think, somewhat befuddled by the movie (lots of murmurs of confusion wafting through the air on the way out), but, as is to be expected, attentive and quiet—rousing only to issue a collective “you’ve got to be kidding me” when a baby started crying as the lights dimmed (the parent and child exited immediately). Still, it’s somewhat irritating that the theater walls are painted bright white, which creates extra reflected light during the screenings. Also, the theater is located underground, which results in the rumble of subway trains passing by (or, perhaps, below), every few minutes or so. I live near a subway line and tune it out accordingly, but it’s still unpleasant to encounter in a movie theater.

It’s a bit of a change coming to museums in New York from D.C., where most of the major museums are free (and others, like the Philips collection, are fairly cheap). MoMA, though, opens its doors for free on Friday nights. This is wonderful, of course, and I greatly enjoyed and highly recommend the Jeff Wall photography exhibit (more on that later, perhaps), but I think I may avoid MoMA's free Fridays in the future. The line to get in fills an empty lot next to the museum, meaning it takes 20-30 minutes to get in. And once in, the place is utterly packed. It’s noisy, chaotic, filled with gawkers and jabbering tourists; it’s like walking around Six Flags during a holiday weekend—in other words, not at all an ideal atmosphere for looking at art. What’s more, the staff seems displeased with how packed and unruly the place becomes, and, while not openly hostile, they’re a bit snippy and surly with the guests. For $75—less than the cost of four visits, I think I’ll join next time I go and, except for film screenings, skip out on future Friday nights.

Collecting tidbits about your NYT critics

In today's lesson, we learn that A.O. Scott, father, Brooklyn resident, connoisseur of middlebrow taste, and general arbiter of moderate movie criticism everywhere, drives . . . a Volvo.

The verbal and visceral elements [of Death Proof] have no organic connection, and the plot is booby-trapped with surprises. I’m hesitant to risk giving away too much, but I will say that Kurt Russell is awfully good, and that I could listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Tracie Thoms, two of the movie’s motor-mouthed heroines, talk through the whole three hours of “Grindhouse,” read the phone book or recite “The Faerie Queene” on tape in my Volvo in the middle of a traffic jam.

Really, Tony, how domestic.

Lucky Me

Thanks to Ezra, I see that New York has 185,000 more single women than men.

Orwell on Film and Book Critics

The book reviewer is better off than the film critic, who cannot even do his work at home, but has to attend trade shows at eleven in the morning and, with one or two notable exceptions, is expected to sell his honor for a glass of inferior sherry. -- George Orwell (via Critical Mass)

Nathan Lee Nails Grindhouse

Perhaps its just living in New York, but I'm really starting to enjoy Nathan Lee's Village Voice reviews, and his wild-eyed geek-gush over Grindhouse is a prime example of why. He seems to have gotten everything I wanted (but sadly didn't get) from the movie, and lavishes some proper love on the terrible twosome behind it:

I've got a theory about Grindhouse, and it goes like this: At some point during the brainstorming/beer-bonging process by which Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino developed their multimillion-dollar ersatz-exploitation double feature, the boys finished off the super nachos, sparked up a spliff, and said "Dude, let's just motherfucking bring it." From whence proceeded a checklist of must-haves: zombie hordes and one-legged go-go dancers, hot rods and hot pants, evil doctors and exploding pustules, trash-talking identical-twin babysitters, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, diminutive Mexican badasses, customized motorcycles, Kurt Russell, Osama bin Laden, Fu Manchu, tasty sausage, jive-ass stuntwomen, outrageous car wrecks, buckets of blood, geysers of gore, mountains of weaponry, explosions bigger than God (Tarantino: "How big?" Rodriguez: "Retarded big")—and of course titties, lots and lots of titties.

His prose is both literate and unself-conscious, carefully phrased and enthusiastic, shows a knowledge of cinematic history yet doesn't let it overwhelm his consideration of modern viewing habits or the film in question. He clearly loves movies, all kinds of movies, and is ready to accept and engage with whatever good they deliver--the smart, the dumb, the nasty, the gentle, the devious, the innocent, the obscure, the simple--he doesn't care what a movie does just as long as it does it well.

(One minor complaint: I don't recall the movie actually displaying any nudity. And even if there was some brief flash that I've forgotten, is it really accurate to describe it as having "lots and lots of titties"?)

Grindhouse review

I've got a review of Grindhouse up at NRO today. I was kind of disappointed:

For hardened grindophiles, the kind of guys (and yes, they’re mostly guys) who live to see pole-dancers with machine guns for legs, boil-covered mutant zombies, or Kurt Russell as a sleazy, psychopathic stunt-car driver, there are meaty chunks of puerile glory dispersed throughout. But the creators are so blinded by their slobbering geek love for these crass old pics that they can’t decide whether they want Grindhouse to be a parody, a contemporary update, a post-modern experiment, or a loving recreation. What should’ve been a gleefully vulgar, low-brow romp is, instead, as awkward and mangled as one of Rodriguez’s zombies — not without its share of bizarre thrills and gurgling menace — but plodding, confused, struggling to hold itself together.

Cobra Verde

Werner Herzog’s Cobra Verde is, as A.O. Scott points out, a movie deeply concerned with mania. But it’s also a lush, wild, historical epic about the insignificance of man in the face of nature. The story about a Brazilian bandit sent to Africa to revive the slave trade is meandering and largely beside the point, as are all of the characters except for Cobra Verde (Klaus Kinski, who appears something like a cross between Hannibal Lecter and a rabid mountain lion). No, this is a movie about sight and sensation, will and self, man and the elements.

The movie’s visuals are, quite simply, astounding; Herzog’s orchestration of masses of African natives into singing, marching, fighting swarms and hordes is an awesome feat. But even the stillest, most sparsely populated shots are fascinatingly dense. The film’s shots have incredible depth, and are layered with action, not just giving us the simple long view, but as many as four or five planes of movement between the subject and the camera. Even in shots where it may seem unnecessary, Herzog always puts something in background and the foreground—as if to suggest that his subject will always be obscured in some way.

More importantly, the relentless depth and detail serve to remind the viewer that each and every action takes place within a complex, detailed context; often, the context nearly overwhelms the main action. Cobra Verde, then, is the story of a man struggling to break free from the crushing, dense confines of his surroundings. When, in the film’s epic and devastating final shot, he attempts to drag a boat into the sea and is finally swallowed up in its waters, we see that even his insane, Herculean efforts are not enough; his surroundings have pulled him down to the ground and all but washed him away.

A Good Week to be a Geek in New York

Coming soon: Spider-Man week!

Thoroughly Deserved

You'll want to read Andrew Stuttaford's review of The Tudors today, which begins with this lovely line: "No television series boasting an opening sequence that includes a brutal assassination, ecstatic adulterous sex, the gorgeously bared breasts of Ruta Gedmintas, and an angry, thoroughly deserved, shout of 'French bastards' will ever get too harsh a review from me." I tried to watch it last week, but my On-Demand pooped out. Maybe it's time to add a new show to the list?

What Film Critics Don't Need to Know

Look, I'm all for film critics being knowledgeable about the art and history of film criticism, but Ronald Bergan's Guardian blog post, "What Every Film Critic Must Know," is a cranky, curmudgeonly example of the Dougherty doctrine--"If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you"--except applied to film criticism. He could've just written, "If film critics were more like me, film criticism would be better off," and been done with it.

I don't see, for example, how knowing anything about jidai-geki is going to help anyone "read" the next Michael Bay film, or how having seen every Bunuel film will come much in handy when reviewing next fall's crop of self-important, Oscar-hopeful period pics. The vast majority of movies that a critic, especially a critic outside New York or L.A., must see and review are breezy popular entertainments that have little to do with Bergan's list of must-sees and reads. Now, it doesn't hurt to have seen all those classic films, and anyone reviewing film professionally will hopefully have an interest in seeking out this sort of noteworthy material. But I don't think anyone is going to be terribly worse off for not having seen them while reviewing I, Robot.

No, Bergan's criteria doesn't have much use for most mainstream film critics these days; instead, he's put together a pretty solid list of requirements for what it should take to become a film studies professor--which, surprise surprise, is just what Bergan is. Gosh, imagine that: a professor arguing that more people need to take and value the type of courses he teaches...

You Talkin' To Me?

It should be noted that the IFC Center is showing Taxi Driver at midnight next Friday and Saturday. This is one of my all time favorite movies; the number of times I've seen it probably reaches into the triple digits. Never in a theater, though, and as we all know, you've never really seen a movie till you've seen it in a theater with a crowd of strangers. Needless to say, I'll be there.

Grindhouse Press Screening at East Village

I know I’ve been remiss on my posting here, but the day job, freelance work, and settling in to unfamiliar territory have kept me busy, scattered, excited, confused, thrilled, frustrated, tired, and, well, pretty much all the other adjectives you’d expect from a first-time New Yorker. I hope to get back to more regular posting, though, as always no promises (when this site starts generating income, I’ll start sticking to deadlines for it).

In the past, I’ve used this as a sort of all-purpose culture blog with a little bit of politics, cultural comment and random day-to-day observation thrown in. Since a lot of that material is going to go elsewhere at this point, what I’m hoping to do is use this space to talk about filmgoing in New York, from the perspective of a longtime movie fan and current (if not full time) film critic. The idea is to write not just about movies in New York (though I’ll certainly do that), but what it’s like to be a movie-goer and movie critic in New York, the locus for movies and movie culture on the East Coast. For New Yorkers, a lot of this may end up being pretty familiar stuff: what I hope to do is to sort of chronicle the ins and outs of seeing movies in New York from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the town—which is something I would’ve loved to have had available before I moved here (or even now).

Friday night I caught a preview of Grindhouse (which I’ll be reviewing at a later date) at City Cinemas Village East on 2^nd Ave. It was a smart pick for the film—an old, downtown theater with an elaborate dome and a sharply inclined balcony over the main seating. The seats and aisles were somewhat cramped, especially since a lot of people came from the office and still had bags, coats, and other assorted movie theater carry-ons. The theater has a big screen and a pretty solid sound system, which, to the movie’s benefit, was turned out nice and loud. Press got most of the balcony, and the rest of the theater was filled up with lucky preview-goers (who waited in line for quite a while outside). I always feel kind of sorry for those regular joes waiting hours to see a movie early, but at the same time, it can actually add to the experience. I’ve waited in multi-hour lines for movies on a couple of occasions, and it tends to make the movie better—the crowd is jittery, anxious, and when the movie finally starts, it’s a release, even a rush. I think it was a good move to bring in fans off the street for Grindhouse, as it’s a movie that benefits from crowd energy.

The screening setup here in New York is quite different from D.C. In D.C., there are only two companies that handle all the screenings, there’s only one private screening room (at the MPAA), and there are probably less than 50 semi-regular movie critics in the city (a number of whom have other jobs or also cover other stuff for their publications). Once you get on the regular screening list for each of the companies, you don’t have to RSVP to screenings or go out of your way to find out times and get reservations. Screening info is emailed to you on a pretty regular basis, and you can just show up and give them your name and affiliation: you’re on the list and that’s all that’s needed.

Here, screenings are handled by a variety of different companies, and with many of the bigger films, critics (at least for smaller publications) have to actively pursue screening invites. There are a lot of folks in the movie press here, so there are actually tiers of press at the public screenings, with decent seats for the general press and the best seats for the bigger press (I’m assuming New York Times, New York, New Yorker, New York Press—pretty much any pub with the word New York in its title, as well as the other obvious ones: Village Voice, Time, etc…). I also got a gigantic packet of press material: summaries of both movies, interviews with the directors and actors, write ups of all the characters and bios of all the major players. Probably close to 50 pages of stuff. I can’t recall ever getting more than a single page press release for any film I reviewed in D.C.

The show didn’t start till about 30 minutes after the scheduled start time, which was very weird to me—no D.C. screening I went to started more than 3 minutes off schedule—but from the conversation between the two gentlemen next to me, both of whom seemed to be press screening regulars, I gather that late starts are somewhat abnormal in New York as well.

The pre-movie conversation I overheard was dominated by fairly knowledgeable movie-talk. Now you might expect this in a theater full of movie press. But in D.C., at least at the evening screenings, that’s often not the case. A lot of non-movie press and friends of press get themselves invited to the evening previews, usually just to go and see the movie early and for free. I certainly don’t begrudge them this (who doesn’t love free, early movies?), but it often meant that there weren’t a lot of serious movie nerds in attendance. The day screenings were different, of course, though it was almost like a club, as there were only a relative handful of folks who did it regularly and they all spent a lot of time seeing movies together. As such, it wasn’t quite as intense.

Maybe it was brought out in part by the fact that the movie was Tarantino-made movie-junkie-candy, but the room seemed thick with the air of cinema geek, and it was nice to be in the presence of what at least felt like a whole bunch of hardened, devoted, life-long theater goers.

I saw Werner Herzog’s 1987 Cobra Verde this afternoon at IFC Center, and I’m hoping to go back tomorrow to see Killer of Sheep (I was too tired to hack a double-feature today). More on those later.