jane dark's sugarhigh!

even more albums of the year: five final paragaphs

If one were mandated to name a country album of the year, it would likely be Taylor Swift, but not without competition from, for example, Keith Urban's quite lovely if badly-titled Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing, which was on and off and not quite crazy enough, but had a slew of tremendous songs, including "Won't Let You Down," "Faster Car," "Raise the Roof," and the outsized "Stupid Boy," which sometimes seems to be the singer talking to himself, sometimes to the ex of his paramour, which is to say that the song is haunted by the specter of Tom Cruise, to whom the song's title could not possibly do justice.

Kelly Willis has sort of become the country's Jennifer Jason Leigh, who didn't win the Oscar when she shoulda, and has since wandered or been shouldered ever closer to the margins of the genre, of success, and of artistic viability — oscillating between brittle recapitulations and aimless experiments. Willis could've been a platinum Grammy factory in '93 or '99 and has drifted ever since; this year, with Translated From Love, she has has come up against the shoals of something sweetly eccentric and alluring and not that far from the American songbook's desolation row. The opener, "Nobody Wants to go to the Moon Anymore" is a little rockabilly and a lot Tin Pan Alley and much of the remainder — almost all of it quite a few paces slower — keeps its Tin ear. These are songs that deepen with frequent listening and cut more sharply late at night, especially the title track, "The More That I'm Around You," and the cruelly clear "Stone's Throw Away," arguably the prettiest and saddest song of the year.

But in some strange way, the album of the year was Google. We don't mean that at all, but we do mean something. The only artist who could compete with M.I.A. this year was Lil Wayne, and you could sort of squint and pretend he had an album this year, but that's dubious and even if it weren't, Da Drought 3 is no album of the year. All of this shows exactly how weak the concept of album has become; if you've been following the adventures of Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr., you know that he's reveling in the album form's current volatility, which makes him seem somehow heroically don't-give-a-fuck in much the way that the the early days of Napster made Metallica and Dre look like narcs with saurian brains the size of cashews. Wayne's 2007 output of mix tapes, fake leaks, real leaks, radio drops, guest 16s and remixes may stabilize in '08, but that might be too bad, since the discrete moment-by-moment mode seems to allow his talents a chaotic creativity that trad albums tamp down. It's not just a production model, it's a way of thinking, a way of conceiving of one's art. And for Wayne at least, it's a better way.

It nonetheless begs what is basically a software question: shouldn't there be some program with which you can essentially scour the digiverse via some Boolean headhunting (Lil Wayne AND >100sec AND >192kbps AND 2007 BUT NOT Kanye: 70 minutes) and get all such tracks bundled together on your hard-drive an hour or two later? There sort of is. Seeqpod is not the sort of warez that survives, being balky and having limited, inexact targetability and, most significantly, sharing with imeem the fatal flaw of giving you only a stream. The days of every pop music listener having a 24/7 fast pipe are still too far off, and such streaming platforms are little more than fairly customizable radio stations that are neither as stable nor accessible as old-fashioned broadcast, and make the labels perfectly happy. No, we're talking about an aggregator program with fine-carving finesse that actually produces, oh, let's just call them "bundles," that you can play from a hard drive, a iPod, even burn to disc. This is probably the best near-future for the album.

Given that an iTunes Store search and a few clicks is the smoothest current bundling method, it does seem a bit silly that they shouldn't become the label (wth Jay-Z rumored at the head). But the genie isn't going back in the bottle, and paying Apple by the track for your bundle just makes you seem like a barney. The software closest to doing the superaggregating work of scouring the whole world of hard drives is obviously Google; they say they're not a content company, but so does Pirate's Bay. You could be listening to a GoogleBundle of Lil Wayne, accribitzed via a few keystrokes, within six months if Google so desired; it's hard to imagine this won't be explored. But it won't be explored by Google, since they won't find a business model that fast. So someone else will using similar tech, and then they'll be the new record label, and finally those'll be the new records for a little while.

another album of the year...and not: five-paragraph essay

One always wishes to be generous. So we will make a generous assumption about the gushing over Miranda Lambert's 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, by various of our finest critics and the Village Voice year-end poll in general. We will assume these are apologetic makeup votes for having missed the yacht on Lambert's superb, delightful 2005 record Kerosene, which is to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as Appetite for Destruction is to Use Your Illusion II. So it goes: a blown call a couple years ago, and a little guilty retroactive dap.

It's a little hard to maintain that generosity of spirit, given further information: most tellingly, the way Lambert's appearance on all these '07 year-enders tends to hold the place of country music in general. The Voice poll is exemplary: all those voters, all that eclectic and well-informed taste, and Lambert's is the only country album to make the long list (no, the Krauss/Plant album doesn't qualify, thanks). That's not a story about Lambert so much as about the limits of music critics, and the kinds of value judgments that everyone not-so-secretly agrees on.

The critical effusion in re the entirely decent Crazy Ex might be a makeup call, but it's also evidence that said critics are neither thoughtful nor informed about the genre — that they don't fashion their jobs description to include keeping up with an American music which features an almost identical popularity to hiphop, according to SoundScan. Theres a technical name for this practice of deciding before hearing: one might call it "pre-judging," or, in common parlance, prejudice. At least Jody Rosen's heard of Brad Paisley.

Here's a thought problem. What if we were to devise a category and limit it to country albums by women? Or even just by blond women — no, wait, let's limit it to blond women who write most of their own material, got started as teens, and released a country album in 2007? Even if we narrow the aperture down to that very tiny category, Miranda Lambert is in a tough fight for runner-up, with Kelly Pickler. And neither of them is particularly close to Taylor Swift, whose debut album Taylor Swift isn't as good as Kerosene (which might be a once-in-a-decade disc), but is a whole lot better than this year's models, with three songs that could've made the top singles list except that one of them made last year's and got a lengthy writeup about the next generation.

Which is to say: Swift's been around, and all over the radio long enough that music critics should be all over her. Except they don't hear that frequency. One fears they'll be playing catchup again, or taking notice of her now that she's covering Rihanna and Beyonce in concert, which will somehow do more to establish her talent and credibility and general fun-to-listen-to-ness than any number of terrific country singles could do. And so they will end up voting for her next album by way of apology, while missing out on any number of popular and beloved albums of 2009 that also happen to be aces all the way down. Which will turn out to be a sort of embarrassment for said critics, just like this year's Lambert votes.

more albums of the year

M.I.A.'s album and vibe had such a mindshare among our pals that more than one person suggested to us that they heard it underneath Blackout, especially in the song "Toy Soldier." One could certainly imagine that as an an Arular title, though the track sounded far more like Betty Boo, and Britney could do a lot worse. Either way it's a fine song, one of five or six on the darkly rollicking gallop, ending with the fine r'n'b slogroove "Why Should I Be Sad?"; whoever sings those little Princesque asides ("Britney let's go," "hey baby, what's your name?") is sort of a genius. Miss American Dream herself has a narrow but weirdly fascinating vocal talent: a sort of aggravated coo that slips as easily into talk as song. It's a style perfectly confabulated for an album whose emotional content is I fucking hate K-Fed and the paparazzi, all of whom I feel responsible for. Except that the style has more or less been with her from the jumpoff — oh baby baby how was I supposed to know that something wasn't right here? — a passive-aggressive purr so extreme it tilts immediately into sado-masochism. As a style, it's better suited to the production gifts of Monsieurs Bloodshy & Avant than to that of Señor Danja; he makes her sound too cold. Justin actually does a better job with such chilled precision, while Christina's vocal style is hot (but not le jazz hot, please), and Fergie has herself a louche cool. Whichever way, it's interesting to see the Western world's great producers and its former Mouseketeers circling each other looking for a fit, a hit, a meeting of the minds. This has been the core activity of pop music for almost a decade now, it's going away less than you think, and when things break right, you want a piece of it.

This should have been the year when hyphy took over; instead it couldn't find a direction. This allowed certain facts to come clear — most notably, that hyphy doesn't quite have the sudden explosion of talents that often appears around such energetic new movements. There are quite a few entrancing microphone stylists beyond E-40 but, alas, no genius producers beyond RickRock, and that sets limits on how far things can go. RR can get hectic or roll slow, and he finally delivered the Federation's album, Whateva, which suffered from incoherence and skits but still had some of the best loops and hooks hip-hop could come up with this year, including the perplexing "From the Bay," which is about something or other or it isn't about anything but what the title sez, but has one of the few tracks to have the stones to model itself on "Ante Up."

Our local music clerk was discussing Tupac's productivity of late: "once you're dead, you can really shut out the bullshit and focus more on the music." Elliot Smith is dead, and Neil Young hasn't done much of interest in about 18 years, and both released great records this year. New Moon tosses up 24 unreleased tracks recorded between 1994-97, most of which are appealing and a couple of which are beyond bittersweet: "See You Later" and "All Cleaned Out." "Got a choke chain," begins the former, instantly recalling "Rose Parade" — but the rhyme comes quicker. "Got a choke chain, made out of Night Train," and that's a nine syllable couplet snapping back on you quickly and painfully as the aforementioned choke chain, so that later when he slows things down, it's all the more attenuated: "See you later...see you later...if I see you at all."

Meanwhile, Neil Young released a set from some joint in Toronto, Live at Massey Hall 1971, and seriously, pretty much any 68 minutes he recorded between 1969-75 could be released now and be an album of the year. In this case it's an acoustic set and he strums "Cowgirl in the Sand" down to about four-plus minutes and it seems just right, which is some kind of magic trick. Remember when he was going to release, like, a 100-cd set from his crazy collection of masters and you started setting a few scrubby bills aside every month like a Christmas account so you could gaffle the barn-sized box when it came out, you waited and you saved, and then the months became years and you spent the Neil's Fucking Archives Stash on three and a half hours of cocaine, and that was maybe six years ago? Meanwhile we're still waiting.

In the last 18 years, most of Neil Young's best music has been made by Uncle Tupelo and its offshoots — less so Tweedy's Wilco and more so Jay Farrar, under his own flag and that of Son Volt. So it's fascinating that The Search, Son Volt's best album since their debut, spends the least time yet in Young country. It even visits Williamsburg, for the (gulp) haunting "L Train," which is almost as violet-mooded as "Methamphetamine," the song that precedes it. These two lulling tragedies answer the early ravers, "The PIcture," and "Action," which ends somewhere closer to Road Warrior territory: "Gasoline junkies, feral diesel fiends, looking for action on the mercy wide road." Seriously, if someone from Uncle T has to be publishing books of poetry, maybe we could arrange a little switch.

album of the year: the five-paragraph essay

Kala is not the album of the year because it has three great songs (“Bamboo Banga,” “Bird Flu,” “Paper Planes”) and at least three very good ones (“Hussel,” “XR2,” “World Town”). Neither is it album of the year because it’s more interesting than the sum of its parts, a more body’n’mind moving listen if one goes straight through, an album as the concept endures (weakly, it seems). Those facts have something to do with it — but Kala is the album of the year because it is the soundtrack of a world turned upside down.

For decades, “world music” has basically been reggae.* Not in the sense of accent on the three, but as a structure of feeling: songs of freedom punctuated by melancholy domestic plaints, built on a foundation of rhythm guitar and percussive lilt, with a sense of patient endurance and occasional exhortation. A liberal-progressive politics of hope with a beat you can nod along to, convivial both to doobie and dinner party. That in fact describes the other current hero of world music, Manu Chao; you’ll notice that his international breakthrough, Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, is practically named “Politics of Hope.” Manu Chao is excellent, and he is also reggae — sometimes in fact, and always in feeling. He released an album this year with stacks of cred and critical air support and it tanked. And for all its particular failings and delights, it tanked because it required the fantasy of reggae: that the world out there is going to love us into changing; is going to be stalwart and righteous til we get it; that we’re moving forward together, especially if we’re cool and progressive and down; that a better world is not only possible but is seven hugs and four joints away. This was never true; the “world music” we liked sure helped us pretend it was anyway. No more. At a minimum we need a new fantasy, though we suspect here that we’re getting a little closer to the real. The world fucking wants us dead.

Kala might be thought of as an attempt to destroy the softimism of world music™. Hands up guns out — represent now world town. The album moves past the bubbly syncretism of Arular; goes looking for beat and a form and a hook for the enraged new world and finds a proliferation of each, which is its wonder. Listening to “Bird Flu,” one has to suspect Maya’s been reading (or reading about) Monster at Our Door, the Mike Davis conjecture about the eventual arrival of deadly H5N1 influenza at America’s doorstep. It’s the exact kind of thing that Brooklyn sharpies who are also expats twisted on geo-social hard times like to read on trans-oceanic flights. You listen to the nervous squawks and fearsome, irresistible clatter of the track and you think, that’s not a song, that’s a revenge fantasy. And quite brilliantly, it locates blowback not in the romantic figure of some lone terrorist, but in global structure itself: terror as an inevitable outcome of evil voodoo poured relentlessly into the world-system. In Davis’s account, bird flu when it arrives won’t be an exotic catastrophe we couldn’t predict, but America’s bad faith returned to it after a mutating tour of the planet of slums, the world-ghetto. Funny thing is, that describes Kala exactly.

After all, the album opens not in the depths of some necrojungle around the horizon, but on Route 128 when it's dark outside, Roadrunner Roadrunner! That’s not just the beginning, it’s also the end. Roadrunner has her radio ooonnnnn, and the beat is beaming in from a Tamil movie soundtrack. Roadrunner is listening to M.I.A. and she’s back with a bamboo banger; she’s knocking on the doors of your Hummer Hummer. The song, and its album, have no time for your liberal-progressive pot-smoking ass, no space for your medicinal groove, no vision of freedom and no politics of hope. It is the bad faith of the U.S.A. returned to it after circling the globe, and that is what world music is now, and that is what M.I.A. has to say to you.

The album is certainly a bit resistant, even pleasurably recalcitrant: a pop challenge that finally wants to live under your skin. The question is, what alien life can it smuggle in there. M.I.A.’s döppelganger remains Neneh Cherry, she of the multi-ethnic world-ghetto avant-pop, flying hiphop as a flag of convenience. The first difference is time: Neneh and Maya are poised exactly on opposite sides of the Great Rest, 1989-2001, that brief one-power fantasia while the structure of global imperial conflict shifted from “Cold War” to the current conjuncture. This is not to conflate M.I.A. too easily with “terrorism”; this would be foolish and casual, merely the millionth desperate equation of cultural commodity with political action (if there is a hope remaining in M.I.A.’s world music, it is exactly the hope surviving in some part of her audience that culture can still have political force). But by the same token, it would be foolish and casual to find such gestures merely empty; to imagine that an artist who has had exposure to actually existing terrorism (here we recall that the Tamil Tigers invented suicide bombing) means nothing by raising its spectre, or means the same thing as someone without such experiences. To suppose such a thing is little more than a strategy of containment, as if the thrust of history itself could be parried because "Galang" was in a Honda commercial. That's a way of trying not to know something; Kala is a way of trying to know. One may of course decide for oneself that if it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, it can’t be the sound of the world turned upside down; this is finally to decide that pleasure must be empty by definition. That ain't music's problem, it's yours.

* Our man Alexander notes rightly that the distinction between conventional world music and Maya's was sketched judiciously in this article; we mean to add only some remarks on the historical substance of the shift, and the particularities of political affect that underwrite it — in short, to grasp something about specific conditions that the music is after.

pop07: the year in singles

Sugarhigh! top 40 singles of 2007, in reverse order. We assure you, "pop07" has no relation to "Popo Zao." Some explanatory information at bottom.

40) Blue Magic, Jay-Z feat. Pharrell. "Niggas wanna bring the Eighties back, it’s okay with me that’s where they made me at.”
39) Give It Up, Twista feat. Pharrell
38) Lip Gloss (Remix ), Lil Mama feat. Pusha T. Advice to DJs: set this up with “Studio Hair Gel,” by Barcelona.
37) No One, Alicia Keys. Welcome back, Alicia, we missed you. But not very much. Mostly we missed Whitney Houston, so much so that we will pay you to reproduce her last great song with a few cosmetic changes.
36) Give It To Me, Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake. Since around "Same Ol' G," listening to the best Timbaland songs has created the effect that you were suddenly hearing better — like putting on your glasses after walking around the city without'em for a week. In this sense, pace "Amazing Grace," it is a religious experience.
35) Tambourine, Eve feat. Swizz Beatz. See note here.
34) A Little More You, Little Big Town. You'll be hearing this name again.
33) Alamo, Hal Ketchum. Hearing this song for the first time, performed by the writer (Gary Burr) rather than the mild Mr. Ketchum, was the musical high point of the year for sugarhigh! We actually exclaimed, sitting at the bar of the Bluebird, “I love songwriting!” when he hit the bridge.
32) Things That Never Cross A Man's Mind, Kelly Pickler
31) Rehab (Remix), Amy Winehouse feat. Jay-Z. “My hero’n flows, more lethal than Marilyn’s nose.” If anyone really understands this, please email janedark [at] janedark [dot] com.

30) D.A.N.C.E (MSTRKRFT Remix), Justice. Justice: part of the elaborate global mechanism, often using parallax, for measuring the greatness of Daft Punk. Latest results: really fucking great.
29) Men Buy The Drinks (Girls Call The Shots), Steve Holy. Lyrics are not the leading reasons to dwell in country music (that would be the fact that the best vocalists, and most deft melodists still working in versions of the American songform, go to ground in Nashville). Indeed, the lyrics are often the reason people stay away, perhaps out of distaste for the home’n’hearth Christian nationalism, xenophobia, and gender smackdowns. In this, country mirrors hip-hop, the other indigenous American musical form still with a pulse — though hip-hop, with characteristic incisiveness, has exchanged nationalism for violence + conspicuous consumption as if there was an equals sign between them, which there is. But another vexation with country lyrics is their famed cleverness: if you don’t like sledgehammer puns based around clichés and stock phrases, there will be blood. But if you have it in your heart to find these moves occasionally charming, you will be repaid on the radio. Beyond the title, this song starts in the Garden with Eve, who wouldn’t cha know it, “was wearing one of those low-cut leaves.” Ouch.
28) Hillbilly Deluxe, Brooks & Dunn. Their first pop-charting single was country’s follow-up to “Achy Breaky Heart,” which makes it the exact same age as Hannah Montana. It made sugarhigh!’s year-end list too, which might be some kind record.
27) Famous In A Small Town, Miranda Lambert. A pendant to Gossip Girl, the year’s best dramatic television show. See also forthcoming note on albums.
26) Takin' Off This Pain, Ashton Shepherd. You know what’s fascinating about “Jackie Blue,” by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils? Like many songs, it has two parts, A and B. A comes first, of course, and is all minor-seventhy and unresolved; B shifts to a major key, with an incredibly satisfying resolve to the tonic. Except that B has different lyrics every time, while A has a repeating lyric when it comes around. The structure of the words tells our brain that A is the chorus, B the verse; the music and our expectations of song structure tell us the exact opposite. And this is never mentioned, or settled. This is why the song is so tremendously haunting. “Takin’ Off This Pain” just starts with the chorus, which is smart enough, because the first line kills.
25) Wrapped, George Strait. See note here. See also forthcoming note on albums.
24) Every Mile A Memory, Dierks Bentley
23) White Kids Aren't Hyphy, MC Lars
22) Fast Like A Nascar, Kafani feat. Keak Da Sneak. See forthcoming note on albums re The Federation.
21) Big Girls Don't Cry, Fergie. A good year for “big girls” on the chart. You wouldn’t really have picked Fergie to make an oblique companion piece to “To Sir With Love,” replacing crayons and pearls with jacks and Uno cards. Stacey Ferguson now has more good singles than The Strokes. Or Kanye.

20) Lean Like A Cholo, Down AKA Kilo. So lean back, lean back.
19) Fall, Clay Walker
18) Joyride, Jennifer Hanson. Not as good as “Joyride” by Roxette, a quality this tune shares wif all but about 30 songs in history.
17) More Than A Memory, Garth Brooks. FOS Carla: “It's an Elton John song! But it needs Elton John.” We half-agree; Garth’s secret has always been the melancholic crypto-piano ballad, but he has his own mastery. Nobody goes all tacit and doubles the vocals for a phrase better than Garth. He’s shameless. Indeed, this tune reminds us of the Brooks oeuvre’s zenith, “Shameless” — which was written by that Long Island Elton John, name of Billy Joel. What goes around goes around (interlude).
16) Bleed It Out, Linkin Park. As Local H once said, all the kids are right.
15) Gotta Work, Amerie. See note here.
14) Love You, Jack Ingram. Year’s best Jack Ingram.
13) Isn't That Everything, Danielle Peck. Year’s best Sara Evans.
12) Rockstar, Nickelback. This song, basically a sequel to Dr. Hook’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone,” is probably about the same bpm as “How You Remind Me,” but — like every Nickelback single since the debut — it feels a whole lot slower. This is probably because you can hear every move, every rhyme, every change coming with thudding certainty, and you just lay back in the cut waiting for it to go down. This leads us to the perhaps-obvious conclusion that the experienced speed of songs is in part an effect not of their rhythm but their novelty, which is perhaps useful for grasping the connection between speed and novelty in the long 20th century of railroads and modernism. I’ll have the quesadilla.
11) Big Girl (You Are Beautiful), Mika. Big boys are from Mars. Big girls are from Mercury.

10) Tennessee, The Wreckers
09) I Feel Like Dying, Lil' Wayne. Remember how Q-Tip was always swearing he was the abstract rapper, abstract poet, et cetera? It didn’t make all that much sense, because leaving your wallet in El Segundo was concrete like Jurassic 5.
08) Roosterspur Bridge, Tori Amos. The best auto-pastiche of the year. Not to be sneezed at: auto-pastiche is one of the main genres of popular music. It’s all Nickelback has, and they’re pretty good. But not as good as Tori.
07) Over It, Katharine McPhee. As Alexander pointed out, JoJo’s “Too Little Too Late” with the notes in different places. Which is true, on the so-what tip.
06) I'm With The Band, Little Big Town. See note here.
05) What Goes Around.../...Comes Around (Interlude), Justin Timberlake. JT has a certain kind of song, of which this is the best yet, that sounds like a million dollars on a crying jag, as seen through the impossibly glossy black of a plasma screen, pivoting across a pyramid of Quaaludes from self-indulgent misery to a killing spree, and you sort of can’t imagine how come every pop song doesn’t sound exactly like this, except no one else comes even close to the JT vibe, which is saying something.
04) Our Song, Taylor Swift. See note here.
03) Crank That, Soulja Boy Tell'em. Snap music’s follow-up to “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It” and “Do It To It” was the world’s follow-up to the Macarena and the Achy Breaky. Blame it not on the sunshine nor the moonlight, neither the good times. We are begging you, kind sirs and madams, to blame it on the boogie.
02) Watching Airplanes, Gary Allan
01) Piece Of Me, Britney Spears. Least explicable thing in this song of endless thrills is her decision to pronounce the word “derriere” in that St. Louis vernacular tone we know so well from Chingy and Nelly: dairy-urr. An unaccountable wigger moment, lyrically spliced up against the word “Philipines,” it suggests a transnational, transracial nowhere which is nonetheless organized by visions of Britney’s ass, a piece of which we apparently want. See note here.

A note on measure: unlike our film listing, which includes all first run movies seen in the theater, pop07 includes only songs we've loved at least a little. The results were tabulated by adding all the numbers from various iTunes displays and judiciously accounting for a minimum of in-dash listening; and then applying a proprietary algorithm which balances against the track's release date over the span of the year, taking into account the roll-off curve called "getting tired of a song." This method remains imperfect in much the ways that a subjective tabulation might (it has a slight skew for songs released late enough that their roll-off would happen in 2008), but is our best approach to objective recording.

A note on eligibility: historically, if a single makes the sugarhigh! list, the disc from which it's drawn is prohibited from that year's album list, and vice versa. This idiosyncrasy, in addition to broadening the field, was designed to protect the sense of singularity which is a crucial quality of songs on the singles list, and of our experience of them. However, this is a sort of watershed year. Because we are slowly abandoning the album list altogether (in part because the world is abandoning the album form, in part because it doesn't express much about our listening practices, and in part because we've opted out of the year end polls), the distinction makes less sense; it is preserved to the extent that, for example, we did listen to M.I.A.'s disc as an album. However, in reducing the album list to a unified prose note (forthcoming), we've mentioned therein the strength of certain albums which contributed singles to this list.

the golden compass

Softporn from the standpoint of steampunk.

The shift from Pullman's book to Weitz's film, in terms of its central conflict, is akin to making a movie of the French Revolution in which the crux is that Marie Antoinette is mean to kids. As much as we understand that children's books especially do put children in harm's way, as a narrative trope this has now become as powerfully counter-political as, say, the writings of Ayn Rand were in their day.

more teaser, less firecat

As much as we love Bobby Christgau and believe him to be not just decent but heroic, Latifah's had it up there with "democratic vitality." We assume he is not referring to any recent candidate's debates, and means something about the energetic breadth of the year's music. We find ourselves curious as to what traits distinguish this empirical phenomenon as "democratic vitality," rather than, say, "the current regime of niche marketing."

And voting Kala numero uno at the same time? The cognitive dissonance could just kill a man. Stay tuned for our year-end note...

i am legend

A perplexing film, at once relentless in its linear drive and all over the place. For the first 75 minutes, it's just Will Smith's Robert Neville, the last good man, versus the denuded and albinofied zombies; it's all very kill whitey, though the film seems obdurately unaware of this blazingly obvious fact. Also never mentioned: in the background of Neville's Washington Square townhouse are masterpieces presumptively boosted from MoMA (Henri Rousseau, a couple Van Goghs, etc; he seems to favor Post-Impressionists). The film shares the trope of institutionally marked art rescued by individuals in civilization's collapse with V for Vendetta and Children of Men; do we smell an ideologeme on the rise?

These seemingly incidental elements perhaps make more sense against the film's closure, as the cure is delivered to the lone community of survivors, in a walled enclave in Vermont. For all the fortifications, inside the gates is idealized small-town America. No museums here, no furreign paintings or any other cosmopolitan corruptions. It is, let us say, contamination-free. Goodness has survived after all, and in a dizzying inversion, it's white as an unsullied snowdrift and just as rustic, coded into the town with its autumnal New England crispness, its white-painted wooden church steeple rising salvifically in the exit shot. It could be any day in the history of virtue, except it's not — as the overvoice informs us, it is September, 2012. In fact, it is September 10th as the cure is delivered, the last day of the era of contamination...

two days in paris

Guiding cliché: a version of everyone's fucked up and that's finally okay they can still successfully pair off.

Compare favorably to Waitress: also directed by female actor who appears in film, equally clichéd account of human psychology — this case just happens to be a somewhat less noxious banality.

Compare unfavorably to "One Night in Bangkok."

[ps: modernism/modernity discussion left unfinished: once art stars, displace by machines, turned to chess. Now chess stars, displaced by machines, turn to politics.]

no country for old men

A pretty good movie concerning how the world in which men change their shirts only when shot is slowly being put out of business by the suburbs.

the mist

From the moment the first tentacle comes winding out of the mist, everything's lost. The film, especially in its attempt (mildly updated from the original story) to be an allegory (albeit a confused one), makes a lot more sense if we never see the actual beasts.

Never mind the standard-issue Irresponsible Government Science Unleashes Cataclysmic Result narrative, which hasn't gained much charge since Godzilla (though still promises some interest, in its increasing incoherence). The main allegory, organized around King's passionate if undeveloped dislike for charismatic demagogues of apocalypse, concerns what horrors humans perpetrate on each other, given certain opportunities. It involves Marcia Gay Harden in a burdensome role as prophetess-harridan. Her early diagnosis of the mist — "it's death" — and her leveraging of inchoate fear toward religious violence would be far more interesting (and resonant) if that fear stayed inchoate, if there remained a rift of possibility that it was in fact nothing.

But the mist turns out to be a mere soup in which monsters bob about; obviously, in a smarter movie the medium would be the message. King's (and Darabont's) failure to grasp this, even in the midst of trying to make an oh-so-adult point about how the scary monsters are the other humans, turns out to be an exact measure of their adolescence.

southland tales

In the words of jds! correspondent Chris Nealon, "Fight Club + Buckaroo Banzai + Moby = Southland Tales ÷ Donnie Darko = 0." Though there is perhaps another equation that would involve Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Majestic...

30 days of night

Josh Hartnett revisits familiar territory in what we assumed must be the sequel to 40 Days and 40 Nights ("I am big. It's the titles that got small"). And it sort of is: our hero has to go a month with blue balls, trying not to get drained by a bunch of bloodsucking lovelies while he gets his head right.

The title also turns out to describe what should be a perfectly interesting conceit for a vampire film: in the Arctic Circle, one of the proven anti-vampire strategies is effectively off the table for a month. One could imagine an alternate approach called Land Without Garlic.

Alas, hoping for any narrative device to unfold interestingly in this film would require, as a precondition, the tiniest sliver of logical sense in the plot. No dice. Well, citizens who attend Hollywood cinema for the plot are sort of fucked anyway; it's like going to the club for the time signatures. The pleasures are elsewhere, and more social.

In this case, the main delight is Danny Huston in the Shannyn Sossamon role. Though too much of a set piece, it's entirely thrilling when he rebuts the supernatural tastes of humans with three slow words. "God?" he says in a curdling voice, pivoting his head unnaturally to take in a panorama of the desolated, frozen town, unable to wrap his serrated throat around Anglo phonemes or concepts. "No god."

At another juncture he does his hair up into a little pompadour. With blood. Seriously, let's see Shannyn Sossamon do that.

the five paragraph essay: "it's britney bitch"

It's Britney bitch: so begins the new Britney Spears album, before moving swiftly into that most vacuous of subgenres, songs about the perils of fame. It's not that such songs risk hypocrisy or narcissism (really, so what?), but that, since pop songs are defined by their own popularity, the active choice to make a song about nothing else is an entirely hermetic act. Such songs are pure, and empty. They practically guarantee a failed artist, and/or bad faith, and/or some atrociously awful shit. This is stuff people believe about Britney anyway, so it is perhaps even more curious that she reaffirms such ideas by pursuing this course — never more than with the second song, "Piece of Me." One would be forgiven for assuming it was awful. It's probably the song of the year.

The song rolls along on a sick dollop of bassy synthesizer, superfake handclaps, and the occasional loop of an uncertain, yelping voice. Much of the credit surely belongs to the production/writing team of Bloodshy & Avant, and the track deserves to be listened to at full aural resolution, really fucking loud. The lead vocals are processed into orbit through a dozen shifting filter arrays. Backup vocals, meanwhile, are handled by Robyn — no small irony, as she a) is historically great in her own right, and b) was the obvious genius Swedish teenpop market test for Britney herself. But Ms. Spears's performance is brilliant, and it would be a shame to miss the exact form of its brilliance.

We are aware that aesthetes who generally don't concern themselves with the Top 10 universally prefer, among all Britney songs,"Toxic"; this fact is indeed a verdict on that song, though an ambivalent one. "Piece of Me" shares certain qualities with "Toxic" (also a Bloodshy & Avant production, along with Cathy Dennis) such as a somewhat narrowed melodic range that gains its momentum from the bass rather than the chord changes. Nonetheless it is a better song than "Toxic," less artsy, more banging, less for listening to and more for giving in to. That's not to say it's her best song; it's perhaps Number Three after "...Baby One More Time" and "Oops...I Did It Again."

"Hit Me" (as we prefer to call it) and "Oops" are united by something more then ellipses: a fact so obvious that it has scarcely been remarked. The former, lead single to her debut, is entirely masochistic; the latter, lead single to her sophomore disc, is entirely sadistic. We trust a rehearsal of the lyrics is not required here. This striking — and finally peculiar — fact has been easily forgotten within the seemingly ceaseless tempests of the Britney datastorm. But "Piece of Me" reactivates the charged oddity with gusto. Her lyrics, of course, concern themselves with the media's concern with her. The verses seem to involve self-description. "I’m Miss Bad Media Karma, another day, another drama" begins one, a nice rhyme that turns out to be two halves of furthers rhymes, the less-compelling "Guess I can’t see the harm in working and being a mama." But without much pomp, this narration slips into a subtle inversion. By the chorus the phrases, still in the first person, now simply accept the tabloid hysterias as her real names: "I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, I’m Mrs. Oh my God that Britney’s Shameless" (even nicer rhyming, at the level of the concept). And here in the chorus, these ventriloquized phrases, mocking but irrevocably self-loathing, are now punctuated by the punchline, like so: "I’m Mrs. Extra! Extra! this just in (You want a piece of me), I’m Mrs. she’s too big now she’s too thin (You want a piece of me)."

And that's the genius part. With each repetition of the punch line, she shifts the inflection such that it takes on both its meanings in alternation: first as assertion about her opposite number's desire (you want a piece of me), and then the colloquial threat about her own urge, one we all know from barfights on television (you want a piece of me?). In her own song — entirely designed to confuse the question of who is speaking — she manages to appear, via a single phrase, as the subject and source of violence, abused and abuser, in a way that makes the distinction itself seem to shimmer and shift. It's a song in which she gets to be masochistic and sadistic both at once, her whole history in 210 seconds, Hit Me Baby Oops. And in turn she offers this condensation and confusion as a verdict on the media and, finally, herself. Freakishly smart, with a bounce a mile high.

american gangster

American Gangster's soundtrack, despite a flirtation with a cred-desperate Jay-Z, is comprised of thick dollops of Seventies soul/funk album tracks real and imagined...until the final scene when Frank Lucas, having served his time, walks out into a world utterly changed. Well, utterly changed in one regard: Public Enemy has appeared on the soundtrack, specifically that song of anthemic skepticism, "Can't Truss It." It's a great song, of course, and the "idea" — the distance between Bobby Womack and Chuck D — is clear enough, and explains why Jay-Z had to be turned down: if the whole movie is hip-hop, that last rhetorical gesture can't happen.

But it's an odd gesture, finally. Lucas walks out into the New York in 1991: the world in which gangsta has just replaced PE's nation rap in a swap as total as it was sudden. Moreover, a gangsta track would have made the actual relevant point: not that times done changed, son (duh!) but that the particularities of Frank Lucas's life of crime had become universalized into a worldview, that the black superman gangster with a naturalized corporate sensibility was now the lifestyle icon par excellance.

Such a move would scarcely have been genius; it's just the minimum to have an account, and its absence utterly exemplary of the film's ceaseless failures of intelligence, its hemorrhaging of meaning. No one is asking for some kind of heavy social theory, even in a film that takes itself so seriously: it's Hollywood. But throwing up 20 seconds of Kool G Rap (if a New Yorker was needed — though a non-New Yorker would have made the universalizing point better) would scarcely have turned the film into a think piece. As it is, the movie is flatly thoughtless, unable to make even the simplest points it has in mind about the big-boxing of the urban dope trade. Perhaps it merely hopes we've all seen The Wire, Dostoyevsky to this film's Leskov.

And so, unable to think, it simply leaves the drama to the conflict between Lucas and cop Richie Roberts, with some vague suggestion that Frank in his grasp of necessity is as different from the mafia as Richie is different from crooked cops — and thus they meet as odd equals. But even this doesn't really play, given that it's staged by Denzel and Russell Crowe, a comparison able to do nothing but embarrass the latter and his comically bad Jersey accent.

michael clayton

With his blocky size, his surfeit of charisma and screen gravitas, Clooney looks like something beyond the mere human, like he has swallowed every leading man in Hollywood and perhaps had Casey Affleck for a palate cleanser. Tilda Swinton continues to look like something beyond human as well, but more in a hire-me-for-a-remake-of-The-Man-Who-Fell-to-Earth kind of way. They slug it out herein for the fate of the little people, the human beings, making this more like, say, Transformers or Rise of the Silver Surfer than most legal thrillers.

cinema quant: the update

37) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
36) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
35) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
34) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
33) Shoot'em Up (Clive Owen not in fact charismatic enough to make shit smell like roses)
32) The Nanny Diaries (Giammati plays exact same role as in Shoot'em Up, seen from other perspective)
31) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
30) No End In Sight (anti-war doc's breakout star, Seth Moulton, turns out only to want a better war)
29) Stardust (nice swordfight-played-as-videogame scene)
28) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
27) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
26) I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (It's funny, see, cuz they're not gay!)
25) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
24) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
23) The Brave One (a satisfying if false portrait of a Radiohead fan)
22) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
21) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
20) Ratatouille (sugarhigh!'s mother notes this is Singin' In The Rain)
19) We Own the Night (have you noticed that all Joaquin Phoenix's characters have the same scar?)
18) Resident Evil: Extinction (the cinematic ontology of helicopters remains to be written)
17) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
16) The Kingdom ("Let us do our job....We're good at this." Yeah, in what universe? Meanwhile good parts are all Blackhawk Down)
15) Superbad (Not-so-superbadinage; this is what became of Tarantino's New American chitchat)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

shoot'em up

Opens to the strains of Nirvana's "Breed," and closes to the Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart." One might note that this historical reversal is suggestive of the film's retrogressive tendencies; better to point out that these two songs are by far the best thing the film has going for it.

superbad

Though the immediate point of contact is earlier-summer Apatovian comedy Knocked Up, an equally apt comparison might be Grindhouse. That film too basked in a period sensibility that fell just short of being an actual period piece, the surface punctured by evidences of the contemporary that read as something between anachronisms and telltales.

The effect is less pointed in Superbad, less self-conscious, but still ubiquitous — from the post-Lovebug font of the posters to the costuming to the period-specific contrived naiveté about the sexual codes of teens, the film floats in a hazy late-Seventies/early-Eighties cloud of reference. The vast majority of the songs are from some shifting past era: the Bar-Kays, Van Halen, Sergio Mendes, Curtis Mayfield, Black Sabbath and Jean Knight, you get the idea. Music, say, from the youth of the two cops who shepherd at least one of the kids through the narrative.

The film was written by Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, reputedly when they were in high school themselves. The two leads, played by Michael Cera and Jonah Hill, may be meant to represent Goldberg and Rogen in the time of the script's writing, in the past — but their true proxies are of course the two cops, who while remaining hopelessly juvenile, now have the mysterious and comical authority to make things work out for the poor kids. They are Goldberg and Rogen in the present; one is even played by Rogen.

It's exactly this confusion which generates the period uncertainty, and the puzzlement each time the film's present comes pricking through in some slang, or a song by The Rapture or The Coup: the film simply doesn't know what time period it is depicting. This makes it oddly discomfiting, and is surely the most interesting thing about it. The only efficient way to resolve the confusion would be to understand the two cops as the leads, despite their lesser roles, and the unfolding story to be a fantasy about high school as it survives in the pot-basted recollections of the film's two side players, with contemporary kids recruited to walk through the main parts, baffled by their own clothing and ignorance.

One might note that movies are like dreams: every part in them is the makers in some facet. But this would be to fall into the trap of understanding movies as having singular makers, as being expressions of singular consciousnesses. Hollywood films are directed by money — and money, it would seem, wishes to be uncertain about what time it is, what high school is like, what kids are like. This is perhaps a predictable development: Mean Girls, after all, signaled that Hollywood had completely and flawlessly comprehended its own codes for the teen comedy, and could deploy them in perfectly serried rank — a development which inevitably presages the wistful decline of any genre. No wonder Superbad would helplessly float back toward an era of otherwise-inexplicable salience which just happens to be the cradle of the now-dying genre (emerging, arguably, between 1979's Rock'n'Roll HIgh School and 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High). Lodging its fantasy in the moment of birth, Superbad arrives as a marker of the genre's death. And so another form of the youth movie will have to be developed in the lab of summer releases, and it is to this task that we can expect to see, are already seeing, the Great Director turn.

stardust

It is surely an act of unfairness to judge graphic novel culture on the basis of a movie, one made from a story that meant to be a novel and was only a graphic novel incidentally.

Still.

One gets the sense that Neil Gaiman's rep as a genius must somehow be a reflection on the subculture that has so elected him. Like the water-cooler boor who becomes the office analyst because he read a Jung book in college, Gaiman seems to have raised himself into the empyrean on the narrow shoulders of Joseph Campbell. Campbell is not a very persuasive starting position in the first place: a sloppy structuralism denuded of whatever force it might have had by spiritualization. Stardust, in film version at least, for all its stylized whimsies, seems like the most mechanical Campbelliana imaginable. There are no characters, only positions, in which squat a rather unfortunate set of actors. The little matrix of the hero narrative has been filled with requisitely "original" figures; it's a movie written entirely in a single page Excel spreadsheet.

To be fair, this may be true of almost every Hollywood movie: that the roles, relations and actions are fixed more remorselessly than in any Russian folktale, and that the pleasures and communications happen in the variations possible within such tight contours (one notes that this account is a mirrorworld of the caricature of Marxian description, wherein the lives of individuals unfold according to the merciless logic of dialectical history, allowed the most limited latitude of action which has an experiential relevance but no determining force on the outcome. Hollywood genre films, one might suggest, are the structure by which this non-determining and intensely limited activity is seen to be nonetheless the entirety of the film's substance, both despite and because of its irrelevance to outcomes).

What grows weary, if not downright aggravating, is when a movie (or graphic novel) wants credit simply for knowing about the structures, varying them scarcely at all — and this, we have been suggesting, is Stardust's calling card. Let's be plain: Joesph Campbell and the like are exactly incisive enough to make dumb people seem more intelligent; it's equally true that they make reasonably intelligent folk seem dumber if they take to parroting them. That Neil Gaiman appears as smarter his cohort...well, this is a verdict of considerable clarity.

This is not to say that the film is entirely without interest. There is something of interest in watching Robert DeNiro go about the grim task of obliterating his own legend, a task that dates at least to Analyze This and has, in contemporary culture, no comparison except perhaps Eddie Vedder (the strikingly unambitious boredom of the last dozen years must be on purpose, right?) By now, DeNiro is merely a poor substitute for other famous and famously stylized character actors in on their own joke (Walken, Hopper, Keitel, etc); at what point will he have effaced his own history enough to return to work?

ratatouille

Wow, Pixar really is the new Hollywood! In the sense that the films are consistently diverting and one must entirely discount the ideological payload and the last fifteen minutes in order not to experience them as exactly the shittiest thing that culture can foist on itself (in the truly insane postlude here, the figure of the intellectual — the critic — ends by confronting his true peasant origins, admitting that intellectual life is a parasitic sham except insofar as it on rare occasion valorizes natural genius sprung from the earth, and then ends by abandoning criticism for the true and authentic peasant life of a tuxedo'd finance entrepreneur).

Up until that moment, we have a different story: the swiftly-becoming-par-for-the-course Brad Bird deal about how true genius sprung from the soil can't be held down, and eventually the world's need for same will trump its need for a confabulated egalité (note to self: is film critique of French Revolution much as Incredibles was critique of cultural revolution?) Bird, perhaps after a thorough reading of Appadurai, seems to believe that the antidote to crass capitalism (the "frozen dinnering" of the deceased great chef's recipes) is, well, uncrass capitalism (see snooty entrepreneur, above).

Which is to say: it doesn't get any more incoherent than this. It's a tangled web.

And on this tangled web, which must be kept in view lest it finally entangle us all, it's a decent few minutes watching a cute animated rat hop about, and seeing how the plot mechanics will be cranked given the particularities of this input. Strictly Mickey Mouse.

sunshine

Sunspotting.

26) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
25) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
24) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
23) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
22) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
21) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
20) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
19) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
18) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
17) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
16) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
15) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
14) Sunshine (Soderbergh's Solaris plus 28 Days Later divided by Nietzsche)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

the bourne ultimatum

...in which Jason Bourne, né David Webb — well-meaning, patriotic, brutally brainwashed into becoming a vacant killing machine — finds himself, late in the movie (the third in a series running since mid-2002, if dates are really needed), asking the lone sympathetic authority figure, Pamela Landy, why she's now helping him.

To which she explains that "this" (black ops, waterboarding, assassinations, etc etc) isn't what she signed off on, initially; now she wants to help him put a stop to it.

Which is to say that Matt Damon plays the American people, as imagined by, oh, The New Republic.. And Joan Allen plays Hillary Clinton as imagined by, oh, Hillary Clinton.

A curiously overrated film; it's not even the summer's most entrancing bit of propaganda, which is all we ever asked for.

25) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
24) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
23) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
22) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
21) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
20) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
19) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
18) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
17) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
16) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
15) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
14) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
13) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
12) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
11) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
10) The Bourne Ultimatum (Steve on Julia Stiles' role: "in like a magic bullet, out like a cigarette butt")
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

ocean's 13

Out at the airport Oedipa, feeling invisible, eavesdropped on a poker game whose steady loser entered each loss neat and conscientious in a little balance-book decorated inside and out with scrawled post horns. "I'm averaging a 99.375 percent return, fellas," he heard him say. The others, strangers, looked at him, some blank, some annoyed. That's averaging it out, over 23 years, he went on, trying to smile. Always just that little percent on the wrong side of breaking even. Twenty-three years. I'll never get ahead of it. Why don't I quit?" Nobody answering. — The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

Nobody needing to answer, it being all too plain.

The house always wins, after all; the games are rigged. Not in the sense that they're cheats, but that the rules of the game say that the player will inevitably put in more than he or she gets paid out. Exactitude of bookkeeping isn't needed to clarify this knowledge; it merely reveals the margins. The only way not to lose is to quit.

But of course you can't quit, under threat of starvation and homelessness We're not talking about gambling, after all; that serves as merely as the most transparent metaphor for the structure of surplus value. For that is, finally, the rigged game you can't quit: labor itself, the only necessary rule of which is that it always returns less than you put in.

This and nothing else explains the development of that subgenre of the caper film which specializes in ripping off the casino, for which the modern locus is Bob le flambeur. It gets most directly at the pleasure of the crime whose victim is work itself; one might say that Oceans 11-13 are closer in spirit to Eisenstein's Strike! than they are to The Sting, much less a standard-issue crime film.

Ocean's 13 is generally flabby; for wit, the best it can do is Hollywood stardom metajokes, as when, caper completed, George Clooney suggests that Brad Pitt take some time off between "jobs" to start a family, have a couple kids — and Brad rejoins that Clooney should try to keep the weight off between gigs so he doesn't have to fight his way back into shape each time. That's one way the film has of knowing itself.

But not the only one. In the most ludicrous of the silly subplots, first Casey Affleck and then Scott Caan fall in with — what's that you say? — striking workers at a Mexican factory. The sharpest of ironies is that it turns out that the strikers' demands for annual salary increase — all of them, in total — can be met by what a Clooney makes in 45 minutes. But the automatic sympathy of the heisters for the strikers is the film's only moment of actual thought, on the verge of knowing what it's about.

24) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
23) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
22) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
21) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
20) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
19) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
18) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
17) Ocean's 13 (Soderbergh's knack for shooting Vegas so you can't tell if it's a set or not)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

hot fuzz

Saw this movie.

And now, on to an update on the rankings, with a reminder that these run from worst to best, or from least preferred to most preferred, as indicated by the numbers — so that, for example, the movie numbered "1" is the "number 1" movie on the list.

23) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
22) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
21) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
20) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
19) Severance (theatre was quite clean)
18) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
17) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
16) Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten ("White Riot" a capella)
15) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
14) Hot Fuzz (lighting in British supermarket)
13) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (pleasure of SRO crowd in huge theatre)
12) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
11) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
10) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
9) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
8) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
7) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
6) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
5) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
4) Transformers (has entire theory of American history, plus robot fights)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

transformers

Given the clarity and accuracy of the reviews here and here, we will merely register in passing the grimmest moment in this generally grim film.

During the climactic battle (which takes place in Los Angeles, Nevada), there's a brief "shot" of the late-arriving Decepticon, Starscream (in his mechanical form as a jet) smashing into and blurring through a couple floors of an office tower. As if in a dream, we watch from a magical viewpoint, mid-air outside the office windows; they spool past like frames of film stock, detailing impossibly the interior stuff — desks, fluttering papers, bodies — being tossed asunder, before Starscream blasts out the building, leaving a defined exit wound. The sequence lasts less than two seconds, maybe less than one.

And yet it is by far the most detailed reconstruction of the iconic violence from the events of September 11, 2001. Indeed, among visualizations, this is the one that has been pointedly disallowed, the image not recreated in the increasing wealth of historical recreations: we have been allowed to see the tower only from the outside, from pre-contact to the leaping bodies. To render that interior image from a perspective too close to reality would be, as we are all given to understand, somehow pornographic; one way to understand this movie is as a sort of measuring device displaying the necessary distance of fantasy at which the events in question can be screened. Or as a particular registration of the certainty that this one day in history is to be the Rosetta Stone of American cultural imagery for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, this gets at the moment of truth within the Transformers franchise, and the occasional brilliance of this resurrection. No other device so lovingly preserves the boy's dream that every single object in the world is weaponized: cars, planes, bodies, existing beyond the capacities of conventional armies. Car-bomb, 9/11, suicide bomber: the fantasy of weaponization is merely the reality of asymmetric warfare, and the story of how it was finally brought to the United States. The movie really should be titled Transformers, or a Brief History of 21st Century Combat. Square-jawed officer Josh Duhamel's one task in the film is to deliver the news to just-a-boy hero Shia LaBoeuf: "we're all soldiers now." This, coming only a few moments after Starscream's arrival, is surely the most dispiriting moment in peculiarly dispiriting — which is to say, peculiarly affecting — film.

harry potter and the order of the phoenix/joe strummer: the future is unwrittten

British Prep School Boys Against Evil.

Only one of these movies has Johnny Depp in it, and Depp's dead man's chest is not to be found in Potter's field. Rather, he shows up to testify on behalf of the oldest and deadest member of the Clash. The curious thing is that he was apparently interviewed on the set of one of the Pirates movies. Either that, or he dresses like that all the time: Depp gives the standard issue Strummer-is-god monologue in full Jack Sparrow regalia, down to the double-dangles of the beard, which automatically makes it the most riveting part of the film except for early Clash footage (especially the opening of Joe laying in the vocals for "White Riot") and the brief second or two of Big Audio Dynamite live.

Now that you mention it, that may be the best future for Harry. Though we hear he ends up a wise Hogwarts parent, it would be a bit better if the Pirates trilogy turned out to be the last three episodes of Harry Potter, wherein Harry, now a wizened and amoral pirate, has to decide again and again whether to be good or evil; the appearance of Keith Richards as his dad would explain almost everything.

Also noted: brief shot across the bows of postmodernity. "The Ministry has determined," says the sadistic schoolmarm Dolores Umbridge, "that a theoretical knowledge of spells should be enough to pass your exams." Quoth Harry, "what good is theory when you're actually attacked"? Etc Etc. Dolores is of course from the Ministry, and is en route to deposing good ol' Dumbledore from his post. As with The History Boys, the posing of theoretical or abstract knowledge as proper to those who have achieved and maintain political power is merely bizarre.

In Order of the Phoenix, the training montage is replaced by a teaching montage, in which Harry takes on the task of imparting pragmatic knowledge of magic to the other students. "You're a really good teacher, Harry — I've never been able to stun anything before."

For Joe Strummer, this was less of a problem.

severance

The serial obliteration of a bunch of employees for a defense firm by the ghost remainders of the Balkan troops they've armed is the obvious moralizing structure, but in fact is almost trivial. Rather, this film achieves even the barest intelligibility (even within the flexible near-magical-realism of the horror b-film) via the acceptance of one unquestioned premise: that First World anglos are unable to distinguish between a luxury hotel and a derelict state medical facility.

As long as it's in Eastern Europe.

And this is in fact somewhat interesting, highlighting exactly the peculiar place of Eastern Europe within the core/periphery order of civilization, as it exists in anglo imaginations: at once industrialized and premodern, citizens of a new European order in which state war seems unimaginable — except for the actual presence of internecine conflicts, that thus seem to belong to more distant states and centuries. The cultural anxiety is clear: geographically, it seems like the kind of place that should follow First World "rules," and thus be navigable by, well, us. And yet even in the last two decades since the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact, it isn't.

Would we know what a nice hotel looked like? And might our lack of code-comprehension, our uncertainty about the success of the project which involves remaking the world core in our image, turn out to be fatal?

waitress and knocked up

"The film also deserves credit for showing a young, unwed mother taking responsibility for her actions, rather than opting for the easy abortion route." This quotation is timeless, in its way; in this case it's three years old, from a review of Saved! that appeared in the Catholic News Service.

Saved! is perhaps the most influential comedy in American cinema...this Spring (especially if you're watching the new DVD release of Weeds Season 2, wherein Saved!'s adult romance between Mary-Louise Parker and Martin Donovan, as mom Lilian and Pastor Skip, returns in the form of mom Nancy and DEA Agent Peter). Both this season's hegemonic Hollywood comedy, and its little indie that could, revolve around the same core plot point; apparently the Non-Sequel/Franchise market is committed to the drama of the implausibly pregnant young woman facing down a complicated and morally ambiguous choice.

As you will know by now, that choice isn't whether to keep the baby. As in Saved! (and many others; this seems to convenient analogue for particular reasons), the abortion option is thought about only far enough so that it can be shown to be unthinkable even in secular terms. To this point, Waitress and Knocked Up are roughly identical films.

Of course, they go different directions: in Waitress, the protag keeps the baby but ditches both husband and lover; in Knocked Up, the woman is not really the protag and thus, by definition, keeps the baby and the father. It would be nice — or interesting — if this gave the movies meaningfully different valences, but it doesn't; they both finally read as sentimental moralizing.

However, at least a couple distinctions can be drawn, the most obvious of which is that, non-stop for the first 70 minutes and intermittently after, Knocked Up is really freakin' funny. Waitress, conversely, is only very intermittently funny (largely thanks to the diner's's Flo, Cheyl Hines, late of the Larry David Show), and goes instead for a sweetness which is now wounded, now cloying. This might be by way of noting that one is a big studio machine, one a tiny Sundancer (relatively speaking).

And this indeed the difference that counts, in every possible way. One might enjoy how Waitress, more free to defy phantasmatic heartland test audiences, allows its hero to go her own way rather than re-coupling up per Hollywood protocols. But that would way overplay the film's independence of thought: it ends with the most grating affirmation of "core values" imaginable, insisting that the mystical bond between mother and child is absolute, transcendental, beyond human will or desire or freedom. Not only is this demonstrably not true, it's every bit as theological as any ending you could imagine; it certainly doesn't curtsy any less to the grinning idiocy of Christian values than does Knocked Up or, for that matter, than does The Greatest Story Ever Told.

And that, finally, is what sucks. Proffered as an "independent" and even propositionally hip and eccentric film, it forwards the most conservative, essentializing, and traditional message conceivable. Knocked Up, we suggest, is all the good parts of Saved!: well-written, well-framed, charming, with an appealing supporting cast. Waitress is just Saved!'s "Pastor Skip," brought in to retrench the community's core values and indeed revivify them, turning backflips and speaking in excruciating hip-hop patois to better convince his Fundie flock that the moralizing message is still relevant and even cool.

Given its circumstances, this is a movie that should have been impossible to hate.

18) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
17) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
16) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
15) Waitress (Cheryl Hines' micromonologues, Nathan Fillion's smile)
14) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
13) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
12) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
11) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
10) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
9) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
8) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
7) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
6) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
5) Knocked Up (Seth Rogen's delivery, the jokes about Martin's beard, Paul Rudd's three smiles)
4) 28 Weeks Later (Goodbye Dover Beach...)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

28 weeks later

So it turns out that the problem with zombie movies is symmetrical to the problem with war as such. War is so amorphously expansive and at the same time so socially powerful that it can cast its shadow on the most varied of films (and poems and plays and paintings...) so that they are each in turn seen to be "about" the war (one would need only to read the last couple years of film sections at the Gray Lady and the AltWeekly Formerly Known as the Voice to be exhausted by this fact).

Zombie movies (especially if one annexes vampire flicks) have, symmetrically, the broadest screens on which allegorical shadows might be thrown, aimlessly taking the penumbral shape of the social crisis du jour: now colonialism and now communism, now consumer culture and now AIDS. The receptivity of the zombie film may indeed explain why any notable changes in the genre (as in the recent trend of "fast zombies") is such an occasion for critical meditation, inspired perhaps by the hope that the films might take on a somewhat-greater specificity.

That's not to say that zombie films are no damn good. In fact, fast zombie films are on a roll — as enlightened viewers of 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead will attest — and the sequel to the former keeps things rolling. Its achievement is for the most part that it bridges the symmetry mentioned above; indeed, the presence of occupying US soldiers, Green Zone and quarantine is plain enough that, to rely on the ever-useful wisdom of Giles the Librarian, "the subtext is rapidly becoming the text." For a brilliant minute or so, it seems that the film's formal innovation will be to use recorded headset audio from the actual Green Zone (as seen on YouTube!) as the entirety of the dialog, and improvising the zombie movie around it. That would be audacious indeed.

However, that's unfair to what makes the movie appealing, which is not merely that it's a zombie movie about Gulf War 2, or a war movie with zombies. The kicks are largely in swift brutality, again shot not just for maximum aggression but also to disguise the highly relevant information of who's been bitten and infected). We get as well some shiveringly ambiguous moments: there remains no way to know why, exactly, Robert Carlyle's wife invites him to kiss her while she lies on a gurney in the med lab's panic room. Love, revenge, pure mephistophelian calculation. But on that kiss hangs the tale.

If war — and particularly insurgency — is contagion, the opening space of contagion in this film isn't Mesopotamia but Europe. The referent in that regard is no more Iraq than the French Revolution, which threw the Continent into a panic at the threat of ideological infection. And not just the Continent; no one, perhaps, was more repulsed than Edmund Burke, crafting his withering analysis while clinging to Britannia's splendid isolation. Here of course it's England where the insurgent plague, the "Rage virus," is birthed; situation is reversed. Can it be quarantined? As ever, it's a matter of carriers: a boy, a helicopter, the same pilot from The Matrix...

16) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
15) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
14) Paris je t'aime (didn't have Hayden Christenson)
13) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
12) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
11) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
10) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
9) Disturbia (strange racialized decision to have best friend recreate the standard John Cho performance)
8) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
7) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career