jane dark's sugarhigh!

all platz lead to death

They stare down the Alexanderplatz toward the TV tower that stares everywhere and nowhere, stares back at them with a locked gaze. It is the closed circuit of history which we pretend is dead — a dead stare — though we fear it is the only live circuit remaining, alive within time as a medium, the honey of time, moving inside dead time, in the time of work, the value of the hand-made, in buyer’s bliss and buyer’s regret, in the master’s hatred of his servants.

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.

i'm not there

Ranking the lead perfs, stunt casting aside (with the obvious limitation that there's only about 90 seconds of one of the Dylans, listed last here but only in a Can't Tell From Information Given sort of way):

1) Christian Bale
2) Charlotte Gainsbourg*
3) Marcus Carl Franklin
4) Cate Blanchett
5) Heath Ledger
6) Richard Gere
7) Ben Whishaw

*Not a Dylan. Sort of a Suze Rotolo + Sarah Dylan ≈ Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.

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.

best law & order episode ever

Pakistan Police Attack Lawyers at Protest

While trying to ignore the slavering banalities of the sovereignty-theory gang (hey look! that obvious thing we keep pointing out as if it were a revelation: still true!), one notes that this could not get any more embarrassing for the administration, given that Pakistan is now distinctly less democratic than Iran.

Moreover Musharraf has now demonstrably outstripped the supposed sins of Hugo Chavez, meaning that if the U.S. doesn't take action againt Pakistan, there will be no justification for opposing Venezuelan socialism. Which means, one imagines, that anti-Chavez activity will have to be even more covert. Seriously, he may be the big loser of this martial law, given that the Allende bullet now seems like the only workable solution for capitalismpanik.