jane dark's sugarhigh!

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.

the nanny diaries

A film of such striking and schematic awfulness (and no, Laura Linney's perf saves nothing — thanks for asking) that to say anything about it would be to betray its vacuity. Nonetheless, we did take a moment to linger over the nanny's deux ex penthousia relationship with the pretty scion upstairs. After the obligatory "we're from different worlds" stumbling blocks, Scion explains to Nanny that they're not so different. At this moment we are entirely primed for him to admit he too is the butler, or adopted, or that the family's broke and he's working four jobs to pay the condo fees. Instead, he soulfully offers that he really he knows of human misery too, because...well, because things aren't so great with his folks. So they're basically on even footing, no problemo!

This is worth noting mostly for its oblique relationship to that genreme found repeatingly in the category of movie we have taken to calling "the audition film" (locus classicus: Flashdance) in which the suffering hero, to overcome her own artistic paralysis, must appropriate the style of another (usually African-American) culture and have that real breakthrough. By what rights does she [usually a she — ed.] commit this crime? While there's no simple answer to the question, it's worth noting that the hero of this genre, almost without fail, has only a single parent . As if the calculations had been made and the math was clear: not quite that a lost parent makes you an honorary member of the immiserated classes, but that it gives you permission to recoup your loss by grabbing up one thing that belongs to those classes. In this case, the nanny.

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.

tonight tonight tonight

A reminder to all to come out to Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn (home of one of the great Mark Lombardis), for a reading/screening which includes the introduction of two new books into the wild: Jeffrey Jullich's Thine Instead Thank (Harry Tankoos Books), and Jasper Bernes's Starsdown (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni). A good time is promised for all, and beverages for some, depending on arrival time. Doors open at 6:45.

baker's half-dozen: the un/expected

1) There is an undercurrent of j-hova in this list. For example, some number of weeks ago, she drew our attention to "Tambourine," the latest from Eve and her ol' pal Swizz. Given that ee-vee-ee hasn't really brought a quality solo track this millennium, which is a millennium in hip-hop years, there was not much reason to expect any such material forthcoming. And yet, huzzah! Bang bang bang!

2) Further, the tunicorn in the same column pointed out , against all odds, Amerie. "One Thing" seemed destined to be as much a self-fulfilling prophecy as a perfect song: so fresh and so clean, but so dependent on an unrepeatably perfect Ziggy Modeliste sample that it practically screamed that it would be her one thing. Well, you gotta work to get out of that trap, and lo, here comes Amerie with another fine song called "Gotta Work," not really as good, which is like saying here come the Verve with another fine song, not really as good as "Bittersweet Symphony" — except the Verve didn't do it and Amerie did.

3) There is no reason you would know about Philippe Katerine, who is either a band or a person, and has a series of various very very good songs mostly in French, which seem to borrow a but from filter-disco Frenchy style, a bit more from homo-disco a la M (not the "Pop Music" guy, the "Machistador" mec), and a bit from some punkrock tradition that France mostly missed out on, giving them a chance to really develop after the fact some droll discopunk, which is very different from the surfeit of dancy neo-new wave choking the clean streets of Williamsburg, do not repeat not get it twisted. Note especially the track "Marine Le Pen," which concerns the campaign manager/daughter of French xenophobe fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. P. Katerine does not seem to care for her, but generously takes time out in the middle for a discussion of grammar, particularly rare verb conjugations. But his finest moment is "Borderline," not the Madonna song but one which, in pissed voice, discusses the beginnings and ends of things: the subway closes at one in the morning, the subway opens at six in the morning, Monoprix opens at eight, Monoprix closes at eight in the evening...and on it goes, getting exactly at the awful quantitative factuality of daily life in the managed world, on it goes...the green light goes on at midnight, the red light goes an at 12:02, the green light returns at 12:02, the red light at 12:04...just a hint of panic creeping into the voice...okay, d'accord, tres bien, okay...

4) Not exactly a Black September for Miranda July: her "playlist" for the Gray Goose makes Stephin Merritt seem funky, and, however one feels about her art projects (of which Hopz has been one of the most poignant, eloquent supporters), her fave raves do clarify the confines and contours of her sensibility, and the way that it big-ups inclusion while working from an aggressively insular position, albeit the aggressively insular position that takes itself to be universal: extreme whiteness. Everyone gets to love the music they love, and maybe there's no explaining it — but that doesn't mean it doesn't explain anything. This explains the wherefores of our longstanding aversion to this indie auteur.

5) Twentyfour months back we noted that both Ciara and Miranda Lambert had first showed up with all the marks of the mayfly, four minutes of fun and done...and then stuck around cranking out hot singles: three for Ciara, five for Lambert on an album that ran deep as Rubber Soul. Well, we have seen Ciara 2007, and much to our amazement and possible shame, she is Fergie. Single #3, "Glamorous," was sort of foul, but the scrapey marketization of "Galang" that was "London Bridge" was sort of genius, and "Fergalicious" was even better. Now comes "Big Girls Don't Cry," which is some messed-up mix of vocal scraps left behind from an unreleased Joni Mitchell jazz-lite ballad, the acoustic guitar from "More Than Words," and then suddenly some semi-soaring up-with-people shit, all of which turns out to make a totally compelling song, even as it retains the sense that Fergie is a bit woozy but invisibly bulletproof, wrapped up in her silky veils of armor.

6) And perhaps we have seen the new Miranda Lambert as well: are you up to speed on Little Big Town? "Boondocks" sort of took folks by surprise in 2005, showing a reach beyond the conventional confines of contemporary country. But the final two singles from that album,The Road to Here, — "Good as Gone" and "A Little More You" — were even better, and each better than the last, with a delicate mix of back country changes and co-ed Nashville harmonies. Their latest single, "I'm With The Band," the lead from new album A Place to Land, is the best one yet, a song that the Elton John of Tumbleweed Connection, and the Skynrd of "Ballad of Curtis Loew," would have been delighted to have cowritten.

7) George Strait's cover of Kelly Willis's "Wrapped" is about as easy-goingly charming as you'd expect from country's leading brand of easy-going charmer. But it would be a hard song to fuck up, like almost every other track on What I Deserve (1999). There, the profoundly underappreciated Willis covered Nick Drake; the album itself is near-Drakean in its unbroken melancholy loveliness, and like a Drake album, as rich a source of cover material as one could hope for; folks will be remaking those songs for decades. For those keeping up, Willis has a new album, Translated From Love, which is her best since '99. Choice cuts: a rollicking, sharply-written "Nobody Wants to Go to the Moon Anymore," and the heart-rendering "Stone's Throw Away."