•Stereo Sanctity•

Record Review: Pharmakon - Abandon

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 21:53:00 +0000

It struck me recently while listening to Abandon, the first widely distributed record by Margaret Chardiet’s Pharmakon project, that one of the keys to grappling with noise as an experience is to consider the inevitably of the genre as a concept. Ever since punk staked an ideological claim on the idea of reducing music to its base elements, musicians have been on a seemingly never-ending quest to locate the complexity in the elemental, the beauty in the horrific, and the transcendent in the forsaken. In makes sense, then, that a scream, the most guttural and cathartic of human actions, would announce one of the year’s most bracing records, one that brings many of experimental music’s recent fascinations to a new, logical plateau.

In an instant we’re forced not just face-to-face with Chardiet, but inside her psyche itself, sent careening from whatever mundane daily activity we’re toiling away at to ground zero of her psychological exorcism. It lasts but a handful of seconds, but the emotional resonance of that scream ripples forth across Abandon’s brief but intense twenty-seven minute runtime. Throughout, Chardiet wields her power electronics like a weapon or, perhaps more appropriately, like a defense mechanism. Her vocals, severe yet sincere, imply further confrontation, only this time with her own insecurities as often as outside injustice. In this sense, Abandon can play like a kind of spiritual sister to Jenny Hval’s recent work. But whereas Viscera (2011) and Innocence Is Kinky (2013) belie a very specific concern with the psycho-sexual, Abandon seems to consider matters of the flesh as just another grotesque impulse hindering our emotional evolution.

Which isn’t to say that Chardiet doesn’t revel in the grotesquerie. Opener “Milkweed / It Hangs Heavy” is all swarming digital detritus, found-sound percussion, and throbbing bass pulsations, Chardiet burrowing amidst the destruction only to emerge from the maelstrom with hair-raising shrieks as the track takes on a metronomic forward motion. “Ache” proceeds more erratically, its industrial rhythmic stabs providing our only possible footing as Chardiet sends her vocals alternately wailing and echoing across the track’s post-apocalyptic divide. “Pitted” turns further inward, with lacerating beats and a hypnotizing layer of drone creating a cushion of tension as Chardiet intones a wordless prayer as the ashes of the monastery rain sacrificial sulfur at her feet. Finally there’s “Crawling on Bruised Knees,” which, amongst these tracks, proceeds almost linearly, its four-note percussive stride blanketed by short-circuiting electronics and Chardiet’s manipulated, demonic incantations.

Together these four pieces create a single, near-breathless listening experience, robust enough to envelop but varied enough to leave you both craving and curious for more. Abandon’s success lies in just such juxtapositions. Chardiet couches beauty in brutality with disarming simplicity, chiseling her compositions to only the most essential components in an effort at delivering a similarly earnest call for sanctification. And yet there is nothing mannered or predetermined about Abandon; like the best of its genre, it charts an inexorable path, attaining a kind of purity in the process. The means by which Chardiet arrives at such a state may be primitive, her exasperated wail an act of dire compulsion, but the results are about as honest a statement on the human condition as 2013 has yet given us. [CMG]

Blu-ray Review: Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 00:34:00 +0000

Considering his fondness of ominous folklore and post-apocalyptic fantasia cloaked as allegorical fable, it's interesting to note that perhaps Hayao Miyazaki's most beloved work remains his simplest, least provocative creation. My Neighbor Totoro, the Japanese animator's heartwarming 1988 ode to innocence, resolve, and familial harmony, features none of the metaphorical or grandiose trappings of Miyazaki's more outwardly visionary work. The film is instead an intimate tale of sibling bonds, parental affection, and fantastical friendships, featuring characters with common, everyday concerns and imaginations as wide open as the landscapes they inhabit. Its unassuming demeanor belies a thematic foundation built on a faith in humanity rare in contemporary cinema, the naïveté of the youths it depicts yielding a certain perseverance in young and old alike. Chances are, if it wasn't so modest, it wouldn't project such an endearing grace, let alone have fostered such an enduring legacy.

From the simplest of setups, Miyazaki creates a world in My Neighbor Totoro unique in the annuls of animated cinema. After a few films (The Castle of Cagliostro, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky) indebted to both science fiction and serial-extravaganza genres, Miyazaki utilized his next project as a sort of spiritual reconciliation with his homeland. Miyazaki's first film to be set not only in his native Japan, but also in a contemporary milieu, My Neighbor Totoro is a vision at once authentic and romanticized, a hand-drawn recreation of a locale both exotic and comforting. Miyazaki's Japan is one of both lily ponds and evergreen forests, fertile farmland and rolling hills, self-sustained villages and antiquated convenience. It's what one imagines of Japan in idealized form, with nary a hint of the unrest that has stimulated both advancement and conflict throughout history as well as Miyazaki's greater oeuvre.

When sisters Satsuki and Mei move with their father to the country to be closer to their mother, who's recovering from a serious, unspecified illness at a nearby hospital, their adolescent curiosity sets them off, exploring their new home, where they first uncover scampering dust bunnies burrowing in crevices before discovering something even more curious: two small, round, rabbit-like creatures who entice the four-year-old Mei to follow them as they hop back toward the woods. What she encounters is one of Miyazaki's most indelible creations, a massive, furry, full-grown likeness of the two miniature spirits that lead her astray. Naming him Totoro, as he roars an approximation of like syllables, Mei quickly befriends the benign beast, resting atop his large belly and failing to return home for the evening. Once reconvened, Mei and Satsuki attempt to again conjure the Totoro and convince their father of its existence. We soon find out that only the girls can see these creatures—a fantasy of children and their imagination perhaps, but more intriguingly seen as subconscious manifestation affording these girls the willpower to emotionally survive their family tribulations while maturing into brave, inquisitive youths.

More interesting than the narrative's wise consideration of budding youth is its structure, which outlines its drama straightaway and then proceeds to consider that drama not in sensational strokes, but simply as accumulated factors in these characters' daily lives. Appropriately, the film doesn't climax in a traditional sense, but more realistically crests as Mei goes searching for the hospital where her mother is resting, leaving Satsuki to search for her missing sister with the help of Totoro and a flying catbus, which will later help unite the family in quietly unacknowledged fashion. It's a beautiful conceit for idealized existence, though not, at first blush, one particularly functional for a film that presumably hopes to entertain a large audience. Yet it's this very confidence—this faith that Miyazaki has in his audience—that storytelling this pure and innocent, this honest and disarming, can provoke similarly lasting memories, that has solidified My Neighbor Totoro's status as a classic of the medium. It's a film that proves time and again that life itself is the grandest, most galvanizing of all dramas.

Image/Sound:
Disney's new Blu-ray of My Neighbor Totoro is essentially a 1080p upgrade of their original DVD from 2010. This yields the predicable gains in picture and audio quality expected of an animated feature moving to high definition. Colors are sharper, contrast is more consistent, and the picture is devoid of any of the source's filmic flaws. Hayao Miyazaki's expert use of pastels and contrasting shadows is well represented, the former bright and rich, the latter layered and textured. Sound, meanwhile, gets a DTS-HD bump, with the original Japanese, as well as English and French dubs, all sounding robust in new two channel mixes, with dialogue way out front and easily decipherable (subtitles are offered in all three languages, allowing one to chose easily between the film's original track and the dubs).

Extras:
The paltry supplements are all ported over from the original DVD. There are many self-explanatory mini documentaries ("Creating My Neighbor Totoro," "Creating the Characters," "Creating Ghibli," and "Scoring Miyazaki"), but with each running between two-to-four minutes, even strung together they would leave something to be desired. Better is the 20-minute "Locations of Totoro," which features actual footage of Japanese locales that inspired Miyazaki, some almost identical to their final, animated incarnations. Rounding out the package is another short behind-the-scenes look at the voiceover work done for the English dub, featuring Dakota and Elle Fanning, an original trailer, a full-length animation of the film's storyboards (which can play beneath the audio mix of your choosing), and a second disc featuring the film on DVD.

Overall:
Devoid of the folklore and much of the fantasia of his more outwardly visionary work, My Neighbor Totoro nevertheless endures as Hayao Miyazaki's most beloved work. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:34:00 +0000

Considering the genre's proliferation across various mediums over the last few years, it's perhaps appropriate that Jim Jarmusch would now indulge the impulse to direct a vampire movie. After all, vampires have traditionally been regarded as the most suave, most elegantly withdrawn of all horror myths, and for over 30 years now, Jarmusch has been the most naturally cool, unconsciously influential of American filmmakers. Many of his characters proceed stoically, silently, and aloofly; this is their lot, however natural. Only Lovers Left Alive, then, seems like an inevitability for the independent iconoclast as much as it does an odd genre diversion.

Jarmusch's work has only grown more opaque and dreamy as he's matured, a perfectly introspective realm for the brooding, spellbound protagonists he outlines in this hypnotic tale of eternal amour fou. Starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as—wait for it—Adam and Eve, two transatlantic undead lovers whose distance is alleviated partly by internet video calls wherein Adam laments his self-imposed status as a reclusive underground musician while Eve mourns the impending passing of her slowly withering father figure and elder vampire, Marlowe (John Hurt), the film patiently establishes a pace and atmosphere reflective of its characters' forlorn ennui. These two need few external influences when in each others' midst, the human "zombies" of the outside world functional only in as much as they can mitigate a few of the inherent limitations of literally living in the shadows.

As in his last film, the divisively experimental The Limits of Control, Jarmusch forgoes much in the way of narrative. Besides a mid-film subplot involving Eve's sister, Ava (Mia Wasikowska), the film is given over largely to bookending acts of existential conversations between Adam and Eve upon their reunion in Detroit and retreat to Tangier, respectively, and contemplative instrumental passages soundtracked by Jozef van Wissem, with additional contributions from one of Jarmusch's own bands, Sqürl, and some diagetic use of mid-century blues and R&B. Jarmusch has consistently emphasized the musical aspects of his films, often casting musicians, writing narratives centered around artists, and highlighting original score contributions, allowing the two mediums to work in communion with one another while functioning on the same plane of expression. Only Lovers Left Alive is, appropriately, one of his most lyrical works to date.

This move from the minimalist character pieces of his early career to the more expressionist touches of his current period has precipitated a greater, perhaps subconscious, attention to the more intangible traits of Jarmusch's aesthetic on the part of the viewer. I get the feeling Jarmusch is concerned less with metaphor than he is with simply reflecting a universally unconscious state of existence among all creatures, living or non. Adam and Eve thirst for blood in an effort to survive yet concern themselves with fears similar to those of the living, such as contaminants and intoxicants, privacy, technology and its attendant vulnerabilities, and over-indulging in such pleasurable aberrations. These characters, as unique as they are, are nevertheless of a fundamental relation to that of all Jarmusch creations: Their night on Earth may be one for all eternity, but they, like us, yearn for a paradise stranger than the one afforded. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: James Gray's The Immigrant

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:28:00 +0000

The Immigrant is the film James Gray has been working toward his entire career. He's established a unique reputation over 20 years and four features. His first three films (Little Odessa, The Yards, We Own the Night) dealt largely with a world of criminal activity and frayed family bonds, often times between brothers. Two Lovers followed soon after, betraying the first signs of Gray's thematic maturation. A simple love triangle rendered equal parts beautiful and devastating, the film was both vital and transitional for the filmmaker. His latest, the intimately focused, epically scaled period piece The Immigrant, is, finally, Gray's masterpiece, a classical melodrama of high ambition and fulfilled promise.

Set in New York City, 1921, the film opens with Polish sisters Ewa and Magda Cybulski (Marion Cotillard and Angela Sarafyan, respectively) attempting emigration to the United States, only to be detained, the former being processed for deportation while the latter is quarantined for tuberculosis. When Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), a mysteriously powerful figure, eyes Ewa being sent to her exile, he exercises his influence to secure her a place on a boat headed for Manhattan. Nowhere to go, her uncle embarrassed of her reputation back home as a "woman of low morals" and thus unwilling to take her in, Ewa receives accommodations from Bruno, who quickly offers her a job in his burlesque theater company. But when the entertainment troupe is soon revealed as a front for a prostitution operation, Ewa resists, triggering a tenuous dynamic between the two of survival and destitution, goodwill and obligation, exploitation and nurturing.

A wildcard in the form of Orlando (Jeremy Renner), a suave magician with motives of equally questionable repute, is soon introduced, inciting tensions in an already volatile relationship—between Bruno and Ewa as well as Bruno and himself, as the two are revealed to be not only professional rivals, but cousins, when the latter returns from Ellis Island at a suspiciously opportune moment. Gray handles these characters and their mounting drama with a natural, delicate hand, turning Ewa from a cautious immigrant into a driven opportunist, Bruno from an honorable samaritan to a stern businessman (and back again), and Orlando from an intriguing sideshow to endearing guardian. The filmmaker doesn't pit the audience against any of the characters, nor does he neglect their faults or ulterior motives, establishing a fascinating interplay that proposes ethical and moral quandaries that these three consider right alongside the viewer.

It's immediately clear that Gray is painting on a far grander scale and with a much broader palette here than he ever has before. One of the common sleights levied against Gray is his lack of aesthetic voice; for all their moody noir nods and impressive set pieces, his crime films tend to want for a stylistic signature. Two Lovers, with its overcast hue, dimly lit interiors, and subtly rhythmic editing techniques, went some way toward cultivating a unique impression, and The Immigrant completes the evolution. Shot by Darius Khondji (Se7en, The Game, Amour) with immaculately understated set decoration and costumes, the film is a considerable technical achievement, all burnt browns, washed out grays, and lightly dusted surface space. Budgeted around $16 million, the film looks like it could have cost three times that, the craning photography and richly detailed exteriors recalling nothing less than Sergio Leone's work on Once Upon a Time in America in its rendering of prohibition-era New York.

But it's Gray's work with his actors and his deft balance between modest narrative striations and larger melodrama that lends The Immigrant its power. This is essentially another relationship, even familial, drama for the director, except painted across an epic backdrop, the economic adversity and rumblings of the impeding Depression sent rippling between the film's otherwise interpersonal contours. Gray is essentially working in classical filmmaking strokes here, building a drama rich with novelistic detail within the confines of a theatrical setup (despite its historical milieu, the screenplay, by Gray and Richard Menello, isn't based on a written work at all, but rather was inspired by Gray's father, who grew up during the era). There are moments of emotional devastation here worthy of Shakespeare, the combined power of the film's arc is reminiscent of Francis Ford Coppola's work or even that of the last generation of epic filmmakers from Hollywood's golden age. Yet these aren't reference points for an indentured filmmaker so much as antecedents for a skilled director who's reached his most impressive heights yet, crafting a personal work of both intimate passion and grand tragedy. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Alexander Payne's Nebraska

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:22:00 +0000

The men in Alexander Payne's movies are on a constant journey. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson's Warren experiences late-life enlightenment when he travels cross-country to his daughter's wedding. In Sideways, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church's characters experience an entire midlife crisis as they explore central California's wine country. Most recently, George Clooney's Matt King traveled the Hawaiian islands in an attempt to reconnect with his daughters and reconcile with his seriously injured wife in The Descendants. (You have to go back to Payne's first two features, Citizen Ruth and Election, to find female protagonists who were also seen at difficult crossroads.) In the process, Payne has become one of American cinema's most respected chroniclers of male discontent and awakening. If his latest, Nebraska, doesn't alter the formula, it also does so on a more refreshingly modest scale than that of The Descendants.

Starring Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, an alcoholic father staring down a possible future of Alzheimer's disease and assisted living, the film, like its immediate predecessors, tracks an aging male as he travels toward emotional reconciliation. Woody's relationship with his wife (June Squibb) is of the jokingly disrespectful variety, while his two sons, played by Will Forte and Bill Odenkirk, struggle to connect with a man they claim never had much time for them anyway. When Woody receives a bogus sweepstakes invitation to collect $1 million from a magazine company, he becomes determined to trek from his home in Billings, Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska in order to secure his winnings. Wanting a break from his dead-end salesman job, Forte's David agrees, against the will of his mother and brother, to indulge his dad's whim as perhaps one final chance at father-son bonding. When Woody becomes too unruly for David to handle, the two stop off in Woody's hometown of Hawthorne, where family and friends both new and old gather to celebrate and harass the prodigal son. From there, typically Payne-like hijinks ensue: the doofus cousins who chide David for driving too slow, the old women who alternately worship and resent Woody, and the old "friends" who attempt to swindle some cash from Woody's impending payday.

Nebraska will likely be praised for its modest approach to the father/son dynamic and its quietly moving sensibility. The Descendants was, in a sense, a victory lap for Payne, affording him the luxury of broadening his comedic approach and generally indulging his sappier side, and the film accordingly coasted on goodwill despite that fact that it laid many of his most problematic tendencies out on full display. Nebraska doesn't fix his stereotypical small-town characterizations (though, in my experience, having spent much time in the Midwest, I can say he gets closer to reality here than he did in About Schmidt), or his flair for bittersweet third-act harmonization, but it considerably downplays these little predicaments. Ultimately, Payne's films beg the question of whether or not the self-imposed journey of his protagonists have been worth the trip. In the case Nebraska, the trek is one worth embarking on, for both its characters and audience alike. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:09:00 +0000

Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive arrived at an opportune moment. Coming off a decade where the American genre film devolved into lowest-common-denominator investments and blockbusters ballooned skyward on the backs of sequels and franchises, Refn's modest exercise in crime pastiche and car-chase nostalgia parlayed both the exhaustion of Hollywood's narrative resources and—perhaps more importantly—the gathering mainstream curiosity in independent music's preoccupation with the sound and feel of the 1980s (the film's soundtrack has become one of the most popular word-of-mouth successes of the decade).

Only God Forgives hasn't been granted such fortuitous timing. Everything about Refn's latest is built on Drive's successful formula, from star Ryan Gosling's stoic, near-wordless performance to a scenery-chewing supporting turn from a respected and unexpected source (Kristin Scott Thomas as Gosling's vindictive mother) to Cliff Martinez's ambient, synth-based score to the stylized violence which gradually ups the gratuity factor as the film progresses. What's left is only the barest outline of a story, which, while admittedly unique for the audience the film will likely be marketed toward, is unable to sustain a 90-minute film simply by its own virtue.

The setup is pure Vengeance Flick 101: When Billy (Tom Burke), the brother of local drug-smuggler Julian (Gosling), is murdered following a heinous sex crime, it's up to Julian and his mother, Crystal (Thomas), to exact revenge on those responsible, who in this case include criminals and law-enforcement officials alike. The sole feature to differentiate Only God Forgives from hundreds of similarly plotted films is its milieu. Set against the backdrop of the Thai boxing underworld, the film makes the most of its distinctive locale. Shot in Refn's typically fluid, dreamlike style, the film is bathed in deep reds and golds, exploiting shadowy interiors for maximum atmospheric effect. All the aesthetic pleasures in the world mean little, however, when put in service of such one-dimensional characters and shallow moral codes.

Thomas's sadistic mother figure is indicative of the film's problematic construction. An archetype of eye-rolling familiarity, Crystal is all bleached-blond bitching and blunt motivation. In an attempt at creating a deliciously evil character in the vein of Albert Brooks's Drive villain, Refn and Thomas are instead left with a stale approximation of malevolence that shoots for comedy, but instead plays as parody. Coupled with the film's other chief antagonist (to use the term lightly, as everyone in the film essentially functions as a dishonorable cog in a wheel headed toward hellfire), a retired police chief with an equally merciless sense of justice, but a yen for karaoke, the film's primary sources of inhumanity are instead rendered as caricature.

Refn certainly retains his eye for composition and his innate sense for creating a hypnotic environment. But without a second, let alone third, dimension to this story, there's little left to thematically consider and deconstruct. We know nothing of Julian, his brother, his mother, or his life within the Thai boxing community, and with less than probably 12 lines of dialogue, the character remains a cipher who's difficult to sympathize with, Gosling's inherent charisma as an actor notwithstanding. Drive thrived on its combination of noir-ish tension, thrilling set pieces, and cheesy romance, and stood out as something subtly unique in an era of overblown spectacle and cornea-blasting bombast. Only God Forgives catches the eye with visual pleasures, but undercuts its narcotic spell with the very clichés it would like to subvert. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Takashi Miike's Shield of Straw and Johnnie To's Blind Detective

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 23:01:00 +0000

Both Takashi Miike's muscular chase flick Shield of Straw and Johnnie To's wildly compounded romantic policier Blind Detective make an asset out of their respective pillaging of genre signifiers. That these individual films succeed to varying degrees—in some instances in spite of themselves—matters little in the grand scheme of their creators' narratives: Each have made more original films, more consistently compelling films, and flat-out better films. But there's something oddly compelling about their unique existences as notable entries in what now could be considered prestigious filmographies.

For Miike, Shield of Straw represents a logical end point for his increasingly robust cinema. It's certainly a drastic 180 from his last film, 2012's giddily mounted musical For Love's Sake, but it's just as dedicated a diversion. In many ways, it's the ultimate Miike concept film: An admitted rapist and serial killer, in the process of being transported by authorities cross-country, is hunted by an entire populace looking to collect on a bounty of one billion yen. The setup is almost mouth-watering for genre purists, and in the hands of Miike it becomes a predictably grandiose spectacle as the caravan escorting the suspect is forced from highway to railway to skyway as common folk and inside intelligence alike attempt to take down their target. Miike, as usual, has little time for plausibility or exposition. Within minutes the audience has been briefed on the case and thrown head-first into the pursuit, with the film climaxing early on with an incredible tanker-trunk chase that ends as explosively as one might expect. This is essentially Miike giving his fans exactly what they crave on the biggest canvas possible.

Blind Detective, meanwhile, doesn't present To's sensibility on a grand scale so much as it seems to attempt a sort of reconciliation. The filmmaker appears to be cramming an entire career's worth of ideas into 130 minutes, flailing from slapstick comedy to doomed romance to police procedural from scene to scene. By the time the film calms down in its second half, settling into a more compelling investigative angle, the audience will have endured an entire gamut of genre stylings, with hijinks at the expense of the titular hero and broad regional humor that doesn't appear to jibe with the gravity of the characters' intended goal of apprehending a killer who's avoided judgment for over a half decade. Like Miike, To doesn't stick to logic or continuity: There are two willfully ridiculous sequences where our blind detective drives a car while, of course, acknowledging that he cannot, indeed, even see what he's doing—and while To's ambitious amalgam of comedic trappings and grisly crime analysis is just odd enough to remain of interest, it's also atonal in ways that contrast jarringly with his best recent work, such as Life Without Principle and Romancing in Thin Air.

But it is restless cinematic mindsets such as these that have continued to keep Japan and China's genre filmmaking at the forefront of the world's output. Miike and To's American analogues—say, Michael Bay, Michael Mann, and Tony Scott—have each worked through similar periods of creative impatience, and they've also emerged with successes far inferior to what these two manage to touch on here. Shield of Straw is even reminiscent of late-period Scott, its opening shots of florescent corpses strewn among sewage and a hearty mid-film train sequence each seemingly nodding, unconsciously or not, to the late action auteurist. Whatever the results, both Miike and To's past track records and mind-numbing work rate almost preclude too comprehensive an analysis of two films that amount in many respects to that of indulgence. Both Shield of Straw and Blind Detective prove fascinating, often times overwhelming, pieces of larger cinematic puzzles, ones which Miike and To continue to nourish, feverishly producing lest they ever grow complacent. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Joel and Ethan Coen's Inside Llewyn Davis

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 22:55:00 +0000

The Coen brothers switch gears so often and with such gleeful finesse that their restlessness can no longer qualify as genre-hopping pastiche, if it ever did. At this point they're simply a style unto themselves, a self-sufficient duo with a built in audience, art-house cred, and, when they want to indulge, box-office potential. Inside Llewyn Davis, then, isn't a curveball so much as another stopover on a now-two-decade-plus journey that's taken on noir, slapstick, thriller, western, and everything in between. It's also one of their strongest recent efforts, an alternately world-weary and hilarious ode to a period of relatively recent vintage that's nonetheless cherished as an era of new ideas, free-thinking, and artistic progression.

The folk scene that emanated from New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood in the late '60s is particularly prone to nostalgia, and not just from those who lived through it, but also for those of a younger generation who retain a bit of the ideology that fueled the nascent movement. Oscar Isaac, in the title role, bleeds such effortless essence: His mix of ambling aloofness, self-deprecation, obstinate irony, and unconscious charm is endearing in ways that many a Coen character has resonated. As he wanders from New York City to Chicago searching for a record deal that will finally take him off the troubadour circuit, Llewyn crosses paths with a bevy of oddball personalities, from John Goodman's heroine-addled orator to F. Murray Abraham's skeptical producer to Garret Hedlund's stoic chauffeur. As they've made a habit of, the Coens fill out the film with a great selection of character actors and juicy cameos, including a wonderful, fleeting turn from Justin Timberlake as Llewyn's rival performer.

What's particularly interesting about this film, and it's a theme that has coursed through the brothers' career from the start, is that Llewyn doesn't mature or change much at all though his travels, trails, and tribulation. When we meet him he's a bitter, somewhat entitled singer-songwriter, and when we leave him he's mostly the same, though perhaps more resigned to his fate than a struggling musician should probably admit. Not even impregnating his ex-girlfriend (Carey Mulligan, in a fantastic and unexpected comedic turn) raises much of fuss inside Llewyn, who'd probably rather be miserable with a girl who despises him than go out of his way to meet anyone new. The Coens don't offer a structured narrative in any typical sense, instead following Llewyn as he makes mistakes (he spends a good portion of the film chasing after a lost cat named Ulysses, raising an obvious parallel between himself and James Joyce's quintessential vagabond), burns bridges, and alienates everyone that supports him. In other words, he's a classic Coen antihero, and he stands alongside A Serious Man's Larry Gopnick and The Man Who Wasn't There's Ed Crane as fascinating, unsettled, yearning characters searching for answers which may never arrive.

With its reverent mix of vintage tunes, period-perfect threads, and Ulysses-nodding non-narrative, Inside Llewyn Davis can play at times as a kind of companion piece to O Brother, Where Art Thou? But whereas the comedy played slightly broad in that Southern chain-gang tale, Inside Llewyn Davis's humor is sharper, more incisive, and more thematically relevant—not to mention funnier. In fact, this may be the Coens' funniest film since The Big Lebowski, a film which trafficked in yet another, completely different type of humor, speaking again to the brothers' broad writing talents. Befitting it's title character, Inside Llewyn Davis is a modest, unassuming film, but one with enough latent charm and unique personality to standout even amidst a career of such wild diversions. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Hirokazu Koreeda's Like Father, Like Son

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 03:55:00 +0000

It's become more and more rare in contemporary cinema for a filmmaker to not only revisit thematic territory, but to essentially re-examine the same basic narrative dynamic from different angles. It's a tack few filmmakers continue to utilize, perhaps to avoid accusations of redundancy, but Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda has made the most of his purposefully modest cinematic constructs. Like Father, Like Son, his latest in a long line of unassuming family dramas, is one of his most heartbreaking works yet.

Set in modern-day Japan, the film paints in patient brush strokes the uneasy association between two families who unexpectedly learn they've been raising the other's son for the past six years. The setup is seemingly vulnerable to overwrought dramatization, but Kore-eda forgoes melodramatic flourishes and instead stands back from his story's inherent melancholy, allowing his actors to naturally convey the emotional bonds developed over time for their presumed children. Kore-eda spent much of his early career weathering comparisons to Ozu (his static camera compositions and familial predilections play at times like a direct tribute to the master himself), but over the years he's finessed his compositional sense, developing a voice apart from not just his forebears, but a step more considered than most of his peers.

The contrast between the two couples—one well-off and traditional, the other more lax and modern—is established in expertly outlined visual fashion, but as the wives begin to grow close, bonding over maternal concerns, the two fathers find themselves only further alienated from each other and eventually, in the unfortunate case of one, his paternal son, who first visits on weekends before the couples attempt to exchange legal rights. Kore-eda handles this material in his typically gentle, methodically paced style, dividing the film into chapters by season, establishing a year in the life of these six individuals who come to see more of themselves in each other than they may have initially realized. It's one of the films great strengths that he's able to take such a specific subject and render it relatable to such potentially broad audience, whatever their marital or generational status.

There's vital sense of humor in Kore-eda's approach as well. He sees both the tragedy and logistical problems a situation such as this might yield, but manages to leaven the spirit of tribulation with comedic moments which set in relief the immediate repercussions of the families' decision with that of the lifelong results they'll have to carry as both a blessing and burden. It's a balancing act Kore-eda handles with a veteran's touch, bringing cultural nuance, universal emotions, and uniquely developed (and seemingly personal) details into the same basic story. In fact, it feels so true to life that there seems little chance that these two families will ever actually manage to empathize with the other, despite staring down the exact same futures. That Kore-eda's able to offer even a faint glimmer of hope while staying true to the tenuous nature of such a relationship is further proof of his unique talent. If he's tilling familiar soil here, he continues to do so at the height of his powers. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Asghar Farhadi's The Past

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 31 May 2013 03:46:00 +0000

Just like many of his fellow countrymen, including compatriot Abbas Kiarostami, Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has been forced to ply his trade outside his homeland's borders under threat of government intervention. Whatever the logistics, however, Farhadi's latest domestic drama, The Past, while produced in France, is a seamless translation of both his stylistic and thematic sensibilities. Farhadi arrived on an international level with 2011's A Separation, a typically knotty character study which netted awards all the way from festivals to the Academy. He'd done similar, equally compelling work prior to his breakthrough (2009's About Elly stands as arguably his strongest film), but with an increased eye on Middle Eastern cinema in the wake of Kiarostami's Certified Copy and the jailing of the more radical, uncompromising Jafar Panahi, coupled with the film's heart-tugging narrative, A Separation arrived at an opportune time for his country's rise to international cinematic prominence. The Past parlays this goodwill with even more wide-reaching potential, extending Farhadi's streak of strong work while cementing him as one of world cinema's most universal storytellers.

Starring Bérénice Bejo and Tahar Rahim (of The Artist and A Prophet renown, respectively) as Marie and Samir, a couple with plans for proper matrimony, but with unsettled prior relationships, the film unravels methodically but with great precision. Farhadi has established a unique voice through such attention to narrative detail, and though he remains a more gifted writer than aesthetic craftsman, his work has consistently evidenced a strong sense of both interior space and blocking. As in his prior work, then, the film's intrigue gathers gradually as characters reveal secrets and motivations are slowly unveiled. It's to Farhadi's credit that he's retained his thematic ambition yet kept his scale commendably modest even as he's garnered a larger audience and presumably the means for a more lavishly scaled production. If anything, The Past is Farhadi's most complex, involved narrative yet.

When Marie's estranged husband, Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), returns to France from Iran after a four-year absence to finalize their divorce, he's met with the news that Marie is planning on moving forward and starting a family with Samir and his two kids. From this rather simple premise, Farhadi, as the film's title suggests, weaves years' worth of experiences and peripheral characters into a tapestry of mysterious motivations and buried secrets. Each character in the film seemingly holds a key to relieving another's tension, with Bejo's Marie inviting a firestorm of emotion when she brings these two men under the same roof with a few generations worth of offspring adding to the calamity.

As he did with both A Separation and About Elly, Farhadi utilizes living quarters as an area of adversity rather than comfort, the claustrophobic interiors and reflective surfaces of the family home adding to the gathering stress. The film eventually, perhaps inevitably, strains under such duress, with each new revelation stretching the plot perilously close to the melodramatic territory Farhadi's had done well avoiding up to now. Nevertheless, The Past is a stirring, impressively acted piece of work, and another detailed account of familial nuance from a director working at a seemingly effortless clip, no matter the locale. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 30 May 2013 01:20:00 +0000

From the opening moments of Jia Zhangke's A Touch of Sin, something strange is afoot—and not just the unexpected flourish of violence which punctuates the first scene. The opening titles announce the film as a co-production between Jia's Xstream Pictures and the Shanghai Film Group, marking this as the Chinese iconoclast's first studio film in a career of independent productions. Prior to his great 2004 film The World, his work wasn't sanctioned by the Chinese government, so pointed was the critique of his homeland. Since that time, Jia has spent time working in both the documentary form (Dong; I Wish I Knew) and through something approaching both documentary and narrative cinema (Still Life; 24 City), effectively—almost imperceptibly—combining devices from each in an effort at constructing an altogether new hybrid. In some ways, then, A Touch of Sin feels like the film many may have expected to follow something like The World. In every other conceivable way, however, Jia's latest represents new, uncharted stylistic frontier, one littered gunplay, knife fights—even an explosion.

Yet while his narrative and aesthetic techniques belie at first blush to a more populist mindset, A Touch of Sin stands as one of Jia's most radical experiments yet. Inspired by a series of recent, well-documented instances of violence throughout China, the film takes a four-pronged structuring approach, telling a succession of at-best tangentially related stories wherein working-class characters are driven to violence by outside forces. Jia doesn't preface contextually or identify locationally, though it eventually becomes clear that we're watching characters from various parts of the country meant to stand in for the greater Chinese populace. For Jia, these instances are simply indicative of a larger problem for the underprivileged, for whom "resorting to violence is the quickest and most direct way [they] can try to restore their lost dignity." If this more literal realization of political and personal disenfranchisement has stripped some of the mystery from Jia's intuitive storytelling ability, it's also notably beget a newly assertive Jia, one of blunt force and a not only unresolved, but visceral sense of social obligation.

For their part, the individual segments are fairly streamlined, though as the film progresses Jia shades and illuminates prior moments with small instances of character detail and motivation. The four characters which drive each part—a disgruntled miner rallying against his superiors; an immigrant acting out against the privileged and upper class; a receptionist driven to violence against clients; and a laborer broken down by the grind of dead-end jobs—are seemingly common folk pushing against various forms of injustice. In each instance, however, they are, depending on your interpretation, either burdened or liberated by the appearance of weapons and the capacity for recompense each offers. All four ultimately utilize their given armament in different though equally brutal fashion (Jia both foreshadows and abruptly depicts such instances, and they're aided in most cases by CGI effects, which he dabbled in to memorable effect in Still Life), and the combined effect paints an angry, morally thorny portrait of modern-day China.

For A Touch of Sin, Jia has claimed as inspiration both the wuxia (martial arts) genre and traditional Chinese opera. And though the connection may be more spiritual than literal (the actual instances of action and drama account for only a small portion of the film's healthy 133-minute runtime), in both title (the reverent nod to King Hu's A Touch of Zen) and construction (each vignette builds, often wordlessly, to violent crescendo), the film introduces, then upends, its perspective of vigilante justice and put-upon tragedy. "Do you understand your sin?" a street performer implores of her audience in the film's final sequence, the image of straight faces staring directly at the camera asking of its audience the same vital question as that of its filmic counterpart. Jia may have conceived and produced A Touch of Sin for and about his own people, but the thematic inquiries of his film remain universal, the extent of his ambition as limitless and provocative as it's ever been. [Slant]

Cannes 2013: Sofia Coppola's The Bling Ring

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 30 May 2013 01:12:00 +0000

Sofia Coppola's fascination with the young and over-privileged reaches a logical plateau with The Bling Ring, a hyperaware consideration of celebrity intrigue and idolization. Based on the semi-recent wave of burglaries perpetrated by a group of high school kids on the unsuspecting gossip-rag regulars residing in the Hollywood Hills, the film depicts, with an alternately implicating and critical eye, the rise and fall of adolescent naïveté and entitlement. It's a subject that Coppola has spent much of her career dramatizing across various milieus, from the suburban daydreams of The Virgin Suicides to the ornate, 18th-century re-imaginings of Marie Antoinette to the Los Angeles summertime sprawl of Somewhere. She's remained in the City of Angels for her latest, but this is anything but a tale of wayward cherubs. Fueled by the very lifestyle they're nonchalantly pillaging, this band of small-time crooks have learned that actions rarely have consequences, and spend the entire film putting this theory, propagated and sustained by the media, to the fullest possible test.

Starring Katie Chang and Israel Broussard as Rebecca and Marc, two idle teens with ample spare time and an eye for fashion, but bereft of the resources to actually adopt such costly interests, The Bling Ring moves fleetly, gathering momentum as this pair of unassumingly ambitious thieves go from swiping purses from unlocked cars to breaking into million-dollar mansions within the span of a few days. Once they've successfully outlined the ease with which they can access such presumably secure homes (all it apparently took was a Google search and a couple of gossip websites), Rebecca and Marc bring three equally greedy friends in their mounting cabal: Nicki (Emma Watson) and Sam (Taissa Farmiga), two friends turned adopted sisters, and Chloe (Claire Julien), a smart-mouthed blonde who spends more time talking on her cell phone than with her parents. (The real-life Bling Ring is responsible for having stolen over three million in cash and clothing.)

Coppola's ear for contemporary adolescent dialogue and eye for picaresque West Coast locales coalesce here into what's certainly her most accessible and quite possibly her most beautiful work yet; the film was shot by the late Harris Savides (with additional work by Christopher Blauvelt), and its diamond studded and gold-accented interiors speak accurately to the film's glitzy title. Her aesthetic, particularly after the austere, almost static procession of Somewhere, is restless and eye-popping, mirroring the adopted lifestyle of the five Bling Ringers as they rip off and assume the glamorous looks of their victims, who in real life included Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Rachel Bilson, and Audrina Patridge. If she's set aside, however briefly, the patient, observational tact of her prior work, it's not at the expense of style, which the film absolutely bathes in. Frankly, it's a breath of fresh air for an artist seemingly content in her serene stylistic surroundings.

But like all stories of criminal activity and monetary gain, pride cometh before the fall, and this quasi-gang ends up splintering as quick as it came into being. The problem when commenting on such selfish, shallow human beings and the arc they inevitably follow is the instinct on behalf of the artist to both romanticize and implicate their characters. Coppola doesn't totally sidestep this tendency, though the involvement she offers the audience seems intentional. The film's characters talk in both voiceover and interview segments throughout, commenting on their crime spree in the wake of their sentencing. Some are regretful, others in denial—another yet utilizes the platform to launch her own celebrity campaign. The Bling Ring can't couch its message in subtly since there's nothing subtle about the world it depicts—and that's both a hindrance to its impact and an aid to its entertainment value. In this sense it's both of a piece and something completely new for Coppola, who's thematic purview may be narrow, but one she's continually proven to have reach far exceeding that of the laconic characters she depicts. [Slant]

Film Review: Roberto Rossellini's Journey to Italy

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 10 May 2013 20:21:00 +0000

This review is featured in the May/June 2013 issue of Little White Lies. Journey to Italy is currently playing in a restored print throughout the US and UK.

Often credited as the first work of the modern cinematic age, Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy pivoted on a spirit of emotional and artistic restlessness. It’s a spirit that its director — and soon, his medium — would work toward reconciling with that of a society on the brink of technological and ideological revolution.

Like the characters it depicts, however, Rossellini’s masterpiece — playing in a restored print at London’s BFI Southbank — arrives at transcendence only by threatening a rupture in unity. Presented as a natural by-product of the neo-realist methodology Rossellini helped to coin, Journey to Italy is a film which treads this radical new path via a convergence of traditional melodrama, documentary-based intimacy and a streak of raw vulnerability prompted by the clandestine affair and eventual marriage of the film’s director and leading lady.

It stars Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders as Katherine and Alex Joyce, an English couple in the throes of matrimonial discord as they travel through Naples to complete a real estate transaction. Finding tragedy in the mundane, the film idly stirs buried emotions as these two face up to the implications of an eight-year relationship that may have been built on feelings as tenuous as its narrative framework.

Rossellini’s conceptual design remains patient, his camera operating at a remove, allowing the actors to find their characters in intuitive fashion (indeed, much of the film was improvised, a practice which Rossellini gravitated toward in the preceding years).

Upon arrival, as Katherine and Alex nonchalantly acknowledge their gathering malaise, the two seem fated for strife and possible separation. They outwardly persevere, adhering to social mores even as they subtly disparage one another: him by flirting with mutual female friends; her by recounting her liaison with a former lover; both by renouncing any lingering feelings for each other. Their decision seems to have been made, their journey a symbolic rather than galvanising gesture.

Rossellini illustrates Katherine and Alex’s individual attempts at mental and emotional reconciliation through disparate actions once they’ve physically removed themselves from each other’s company. George visits neighbouring cities, pursuing fleeting passions with a married woman before courting the possibility of paying for female accompaniment. Katherine, meanwhile, travels a more spiritual path, touring the volcanic countryside, desolate desert catacombs and, eventually, the ruins of Pompeii.

Accompanied by Alex to the latter locale at the behest of a local acquaintance, the experience of viewing entombed bodies and drawing conclusions about their past lives ultimately proves too much for Katherine, sending her careening between doubt and disdain.

Appropriately, Rossellini stages his final flourish as an awakening: as the couple attempt to navigate throngs of people enraptured in a religious procession, the interpersonal gravity — as well as the universal inconsequentiality — of their impending decision manifests as a kind of divine intervention. As it does throughout, the physical intercession of reality into the constructed drama of the film reflects a latent philosophical and aesthetic instinct in Rossellini. Put simply, in both narrative and cinematic terms, what we’ve witnessed is a miracle. [LWL]

Blu-ray Review: Sean Baker's Starlet [Music Box Films]

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 08 May 2013 03:55:00 +0000

Sean Baker's Starlet hinges on a plot concession so tantalizing to the viewer yet so detached from its main character's primary concerns that it almost plays like an afterthought. It wouldn't quite be accurate to label this bit of narrative disclosure a revelation (and certainly not a "spoiler," as no one in the film would ever consider such details worthy of much extraneous thought), but more simply an acknowledgment of a lingering but nonetheless vital piece of character contextualization. In a lesser script, or in the hands of a less intrepid filmmaker (Baker co-wrote, directed, and edited the film himself), Jane's (Dree Hemingway) actions would revolve around this most unique aspect of her everyday life. But Jane isn't defined by her lifestyle, and indeed Baker offers personal information only as these characters likely would themselves.

To put it bluntly, Jane is a porn star. Yet her association with the adult-entertainment industry is about the furthest thing from her or this film's mind at any given time. When we meet her in the film's opening scenes, she seems a typical young woman, casually waking up midday beside her dog Starlet (ostensibly the movie's namesake, though, like the film, it gathers varying connotations as it progresses), fretting to her friend and roommate, Melissa (Stella Maeve), over the look of her bedroom, and generally moving through her day half-put together and with an air of lax complacency about her. It isn't until 45 minutes into the film that we actually find out what line of work Jane, Melissa, and Melissa's boyfriend, Mikey (James Ransone), are engaged in, and even then a workplace confrontation over a paycheck seems reminiscent of many a disgruntled contractor. These girls could be actresses, models, spokeswomen, entertainment assistants; Jane certainly doesn't get hung up on such semantics.

Rather, Starlet's central storyline is much gentler, though from a moral standpoint, equally as thorny. When Jane buys an antique thermos from an aging widow, Sadie (85-year-old Besedka Johnson, in her first and last film role), only to discover $10,000 dollars cash inside, she unexpectedly arrives at an ethical crossroads: Does she return the money, or does she keep it under the assumption that Sadie doesn't need it and probably isn't aware of it anyway? From this simple premise, Baker sketches an unlikely tale of friendship, obligation, and personal and professional bonds that progresses naturally through skepticism, selfishness, dismay, and finally, reconciliation and revelation. As her relationship with Melissa deteriorates over the latter's increasingly erratic behavior, Jane's bond with Sadie only strengthens, as each unexpectedly inspires the other as they transition into new territories of emotional maturation. Sadie even turns out to be perhaps the film's most mysterious character, her pointed personal reveal in the film's final scene as surprising as Jane's professional sacrifices.

Even at this relatively early stage (this is just his fourth feature), it's clear that Baker is a confident visual storyteller. Besides withholding certain facets of Jane's lifestyle, he also allows the aforementioned final scene to play out wordlessly, his faith in his sun-drenched images, reaction-based editing patterns, and Manual's swelling downtempo ambient score proof enough of both a promising stylist and natural narrative voice. Meanwhile, many of the film's best moments play out between passages of dialogue, with glances, grins, and an endearing gaze (and not only those provided by Starlet) enough to shift character and audience sympathy. Sadie is a cold, bitter old lady when we meet her, while Jane is as naïve and selfish as one might expect from a 21-year-old. But each are provided instances of quiet reprieve from their respective dramas, where their true selves are in evidence and their genuine empathy for another woman—even one decade's her junior or senior—is palpably conveyed. Starlet is a film of small, humane gestures set within a world extreme displays of physicality. And yet what we're left with isn't images of exploitation or perversity, but ones of warmth and camaraderie. And in that sense, the film is one of the most unexpectedly moving love stories American cinema has given us in quite some time.

Image/Sound:
Like many filmmakers on the American independent circuit, Sean Baker shot Starlet in digital HD. As the format tends to do, it accentuates certain byproducts of location shooting while muting darker indoor hues. Baker's careful framing of each shot, however, renders such lens flares and flat interior spaces as quite intentional. There's depth to many of these images, and a certain beauty to their immediacy. This is a worthy visual document of the outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a seemingly effortless display of natural lighting and color-splashed composition. Sound, meanwhile, is offered in two DTS-HD forms: a 5.1 surround and a 2.0 stereo mix. Starlet is primarily driven by its dialogue and visuals, but Manual's score offers enough nuance and low-key resonance to warrant a surround viewing.

Extras:
Highlighting the package is an audio commentary by Baker alongside actors Dree Hemingway, Stella Maeve, James Ransone, Karren Karagulian, and various crew members, and a lengthy making-of documentary shot on location throughout the shoot and featuring all the principal cast and crew. Additionally, there are interviews with Hemingway and Besedka Johnson shot at SXSW, audition and rehearsal footage of both as they initially get into character, and a few short mini documentaries on various technical aspects of the film, including a behind-the-scenes look at how the crew went about shooting the film's provocative central sex scene.

Overall:
One of the best and most under-seen American indies of the last few years arrives in an impressive package from Music Box Films. [Slant]

Indiewire Feature: 'Doing bad for the greater good': Kevin Spacey, Beau Willimon and Co. Look Back at 'House of Cards' Season One

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 01 May 2013 04:24:00 +0000

On February 1st, Netflix changed the television industry. After struggling for the better part of a year to regain the trust of subscribers after an unexpected price increase and alteration to its delivery model, the streaming and distribution service took a risk on a new original series with potentially inflammatory political content. The show is "House of Cards," an American adaptation of a novel by Michael Dobbs which was previously the source of a hit miniseries across the Atlantic for the BBC. Showrunner Beau Willimon brought this tale of greed, corruption and disloyalty to small screens across the United States with acclaimed filmmaker David Fincher by his side as co-producer and creative director, with Netflix signing on for two seasons without a pilot.

The partnership has reportedly resulted in two million new subscribers for Netflix, more original series' in production and, most importantly, the validity of a new distribution model. With all 13 episodes of season one made available to stream instantly, "House of Cards" became the first TV show to forgo weekly broadcast scheduling and instead embrace a growing demand amongst audiences' with an interest in consuming shows at their own pace.

Two months later and the cast and crew are in the midst of shooting season two, and couldn't be happier or more proud of the show's quick success. Late last week at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Willimon and cast members Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright, Kate Mara, Corey Stoll, Michael Kelly, Sakina Jaffrey and Kristen Connolly sat for a panel discussion about the origins of the series and how, despite the hot button issues the show presents, "House of Cards" is truly an ensemble piece with a particular focus on the nuances of acting. Here's are five highlights from the evening.

"House of Cards" may have originated from a novel, but its roots may go back even further.

"It really started with 'Richard III,'" Spacey explained, offering an analogy for the show's pointed indictment of corruption and innate human selfishness. Spacey, having played Richard III on stage the prior year, got early and unexpected experience with a character equally as ruthless as his Congressman Francis Underwood. "Working as Richard really helped me," he continued.

Not only were Richard III's ideals a point of reference, but the functionality of his stage performance and in particular the theater's narrative technique of directly addressing the audience informed Spacey's portrayal of a politician who'll stop at nothing to satisfy both his personal and professional urges. "I saw the glee of the audience becoming co-conspirators," he explained of the fourth wall-breaking expositions. "I started to understand that relationship."

"House of Cards" may have subject matter in common with shows we've seen before, but the approach is something altogether new.

"The West Wing," probably the most famous and popular political television show of all time, has been a point of reference for some. But "House of Cards" "is fundamentally different from ‘The West Wing,'" according to Willimon. "‘The West Wing' is what we hope government could be. ‘House of Cards' is probably closer to what it's actually like."

And their method of shooting--two episodes shot simultaneously with the same director--has further influenced the feel of the show and has separated "House of Cards" from those that came before. "We didn't want to do a pilot. We just wanted to tell a story," Spacey said. "I don't feel like I'm in episodic TV. I feel like I'm in a really long film." Actors Corey Stoll and Michael Kelly agreed, comparing the shooting method and unrestricted narrative of the show to "the golden age of film in ‘70s" and the experience akin to "shooting a little movie at a time."

Netflix's risk paid off for both the industry and the audience.

The rise of the mainstream movie industry in the ‘90s eventually devolved into a new millennium of tentpole films and effects-driven franchises. "It created a void," Spacey said. "No writer or director worth his salt wouldn't try and fill that void," he continued, noting the widespread move of American filmmakers from Hollywood to television. When asked about the risk and the resulting revenue that Netflix has accumulated because of the show's success, Sakina Jaffrey simply said that "Netflix is making money by saying, ‘Audiences are smart.'"

"The film and TV industry can learn the lesson that the music industry never learned," Spacey added. "You don't need to give the audience everything on a plate. The unspoken is powerful," he continued. Willimon agreed: "Netflix is always looking to shake things up." They've given audiences "viewer empowerment: a choice." But he was quick to reiterate that just because they decided to make every episode available instantly, that "doesn't necessitate binge watching" on the part of the audience. "They have the option."

Despite the pedigree of the producers behind the show, "House of Cards" is first and foremost an actor's piece.
Despite not being in attendance, director David Fincher's presence loomed large. "Fincher told me early on: Cast well and get the hell out of the way," Willimon recalled. Against the odds, all eventual cast members turned out to be both Willimon and Fincher's first choices. And the individual roles are vital. Spacey may be the face of the show, but he made it a point to thank Willimon for "writing incredible roles for women." And those roles, for Wright, Mara, Jaffrey, and Connolly, cover a wide range. Wright's Clare Underwood is tough but "respects anyone who gets the job done"--even Mara's Zoe Barnes, a journalist entangled in a morally compromising relationship with her husband.

Being a reporter "is just who she is," Mara explained. "That she's determined and motivated are the more important aspects of her to understand." Jaffrey, meanwhile, as a female Chief of Staff, takes particular pride in both her character and even the more questionable motives of those around her: "All the characters have the confidence of their own convictions." Connolly's Christina Gallagher, girlfriend of troubled Congressman Peter Russo, is, by contrast, extremely ethical but equally animated. "She's strong in her moral center, if less optimistic," she explained.

Christina's skepticism is fueled by the men she sees both thriving and collapsing around her. Kelly explains his and Spacey's characters' motivation thusly: "Doing bad for the greater good." Willimon added that, like President Lincoln before them, "they are doing unconstitutional things to save the constitution. Politics are inherently contradictory." "Francis is a version of extreme American individualism," Spacey said of his character.

Hoping to establish Underwood's demeanor straightaway, Willimon wrote the show's opening scene, in which Underwood kills a dog that has been hit by a car, only to receive some wary comments about the brutality of such an essentially merciful act. Ultimately, they went with opening as planned and Willimon got his movie star entrance out of Spacey while instantly outlining the show's thorny moral territory. "If you're not down with the dog getting killed in the first 20 seconds then this isn't the show for you," Willimon joked.

Real life politicians have been not only supportive but surprised by the show's accuracy.

"That it's remarkably close," Spacey said when asked about the feedback he's received from members of government. In order to facilitate this accuracy, Spacey spent time with both the current and majority whip in an effort to research his character and the political lifestyle. "The fringes are being explored, content-wise," Stoll said. But as they shot the first season of the show during last year's Presidential election, and the cast and crew watched the daily news after shooting had wrapped, they began to see the parallels and potential of their own narrative.

After seeing some of the things that were transpiring in Washington, Spacey realized that "our storylines aren't that crazy!" Again referencing President Lincoln, Spacey reminded that history often repeats itself, that "in the end he did what he had to do to get a piece of legislature through." Spacey obviously doesn't condone the actions of his character, but he nonetheless remains optimistic about what these revelations might mean for our current administration. [Indiewire]

Film Review: Bertrand Bonello's House of Pleasures

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 02:30:00 +0000

I wrote this piece for Reverse Shot's 10th Anniversary 'Life of Film' Symposium, a celebration and selection of films we believe sum up the last ten years in cinema and might just point the way forward for the medium.

Days of Future Passed

Even a cursory glance at our post-millennial cinematic landscape should spark a mental catalogue of our most popular concerns—those of death, decay, and, in light of the medium’s escapist functionality, our total and utter apocalypse. Broadly speaking, these notions help drive, if not completely nurture, mainstream filmmaking. But the reverberations from these preoccupations can be felt across all strata of modern cinema. Budgets may have risen and our collective appetite for destruction may have nearly devoured itself whole, but we remain ever yearning and susceptible to the cinema’s grand displays of emotional terror and physical and psychological paralysis. Whether by choice or out of necessity, many of the world’s best filmmakers examine similar ills on a more intimate, less portentous scale than those in the typical Hollywood model. Bertrand Bonello’s 2011 masterpiece House of Pleasures was itself a minor-scale tremor sent echoing across the world film circuit, a vivid, audacious vision of the incremental degradation of the female spirit and a work, in its own way, as unsettling as anything our modern cataclysmic cinema has given us.

Set in France, within the florid confines of a turn-of-the-20th-century brothel, House of Pleasures bears solemn witness to a profession in the process of incremental upheaval, an age-old custom caught between eras, its methodology rooted firmly in the past as its future encroaches at a rate that makes this vocation feel all but unsustainable in its current form. Bonello sketches his chamber ensemble as a fluid, transitory subculture, as each woman uniquely braces for the inevitable progression of her established role. Hinging on the arrival of a fresh-faced, sixteen-year-old girl (Iliana Zabeth) at the L’Apollonide house of tolerance—an old-fashioned term notable for its contradictory allusions to both resistance and benevolence—the film grants an individualized look at the greater profession’s imminent turn away from deceptive opulence toward a more immediately salacious, dehumanizing utilitarianism. Operating via an antiquated propriety, L’Apollonide appears to have nonetheless thrived as an up-to-now self-sustained enterprise that Bonello arrives at in media res, reimagining the daily grind and routine transactions of these working women. “It hasn’t changed much here. It changes slowly,” the house’s madam (Noémie Lvovsky) admits in one of the film’s earliest scenes. She’s arguably the only character aware of her and her girls’ precarious position, their repression borne not of convenience but of responsibility, and by the end possibly the only one to psychologically endure its (de)evolution.

What’s particularly fascinating about Bonello’s approach to this material is the way he depicts the transient state of the environment, collapsing the temporal boundaries separating the historical, the modern, and the postmodern. This is a film of brave stylistic flourishes and disorienting sensory experience, even as it plays with classic techniques of montage, inter-title division, and subjective first-person reminiscence. Bonello’s detailed, period mise-en-scène further heightens the allure, allowing for liberal mobility between the theatrical, the novelistic, and the cinematic. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Bonello, in an interview with Cinema Scope around the time of the film’s premiere, would cite both Quentin Tarantino and Hou Hsiao-hsien as influences. The former seems perhaps the more immediately unlikely of the two to have inspired Bonello’s creative process, though Tarantino has now spent his last handful of films also rewriting history—of both a cultural and cinematic nature—through his own idiosyncratic logic. Bonello’s presentation may be less crass, but the principles behind the approach ring in accord. (One should also mention an overlapping spirit of vengeance, which acts as a catalyst in both directors’ recent work; Bonello specifically references Death Proof as an inspiration).

It’s Hou’s Flowers of Shanghai, however, that stands as House of Pleasures’ most overt predecessor. Though a much more stately vision of an antiquated form of sexual companionship, Hou’s film, with its drifting, long-take cinematography, carefully modulated blocking, and undercurrents of malevolence, nonetheless plays as spiritual, aesthetic, and thematic guide for much of what Bonello attempts to expand upon with House of Pleasures. The meditative, fever dream sensuality of Flowers of Shanghai, however, is replaced here by a mournful, nightmarish carnality, a series of intimate encounters rendered as a passionless procession of fetish and confession, taken to near-psychedelic lengths by Bonello’s elliptical montage and anachronistic music cues. In the film’s show-stopping centerpiece, a laconic interlude is transformed into an apparitional waltz, the wayward souls of these women sent swaying across the ornate maison, futile to resistance, seemingly entranced by the brave diegetic use of the Moody Blues’s symphonic-rock classic “Nights in White Satin.” It’s an audacious authorial stroke, a mournful interstitial turned frighteningly palpable, the attendant impression of hallucinatory rapture boiling over in a manner both grave and white-hot to the senses.

“If we don’t burn, how will the night be lit?” one chillingly prophetic prostitute opines as the flames lightening the house’s winding corridors begin to wane and Bonello’s cyclical narrative reveals a far more distressing nature. This rhetorical question ushers in one last startling sequence, a sort of visual synopsis of the film’s thesis, as Bonello jumps from the horrific recollection of an earlier, violent act of misogyny to a shocking manifestation of previously implied sexual vengeance to a final, disorienting cut to modern day France, captured on digital video and shot roadside, vérité style, in stark contrast to the plush interiors of L’Apollonide. The only equivalent narrative and aesthetic jump in contemporary cinema that comes to mind is Abbas Kiarostami’s similar move to low-grade video for the epilogue to his Taste of Cherry. And just as Bonello’s greater stylistic schema nods toward Hou while wisely embellishing with personalized hues, so too does the narrative break seemingly gesture at Kiarostami by removing the viewer from the drama and dropping them into a present-day realism.

However, Bonello utilizes this jarring maneuver not to alleviate some of the oppressing finality of his parable, as Kiarostami had, but as a device to reiterate the recurring and eternal plight of his characters, as well as that of a profession that may have lost some of its luxuriousness as it’s moved further from the public eye, but nonetheless continues to paint its practitioners as social outcasts. Bonello both sanctifies and sacrifices these women while recognizing the conditions that have bred and nurtured such a habitual cycle of personal necessity and professional entrapment, and ultimately implicates a universal culture that superficially decries prostitution while nefariously indulging in its convenience. With House of Pleasures, Bonello designs an intoxicating artifice, managing to maintain a severity in judgment while looking to the past in hope (however futile) of rewriting the future of both a medium and an occupation, each prone to and sustained by destruction. [RS]

Fandor Feature: Scenes - Post Mortem

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 02:03:00 +0000

Considering its wide functionality, cinema is perhaps the most well equipped medium to relate the intangible feeling of transience. The essentially absolute weight of the moving image, coupled with the dynamic possibilities of its employment, has resulted in countless articulations of yearning, elegiac ephemerality. From Terrence Malick’s symphonic waltzes to Andrei Tarkovsky’s grand confrontations with mortality to Aleksandr Sokurov’s grave evocations of apparitional communion to even Wong Kar-wai’s hallucinatory displays of emotional paralysis, there has been no lack of near-cosmic demonstrations of modern film’s ability to reflect transitory states of existence.

Chilean director Pablo Larraín is certainly not at the level of experience or expression of the aforementioned masters, but in his short career has arguably accomplished something just as notable. Over his last three films, Larraín’s engagement with the spiritual devolution of his country’s people at the hands of former dictator Augusto Pinochet has found him utilizing various narrative frameworks through which to visualize a nation’s disenchantment. The period settings—and in the case of his latest, No, the actual historical backdrop—of these films has understandably precipitated a temporal logic on behalf of Larraín. It is in his careful consideration of both the effects of the Pinochet regime on the people of Chile and the volatile temperament of the era, however, where his unblinking realization of a culture in transition is most deeply felt.

Each of these film’s reflect the implications of Pinochet’s reign in their own unique way, but it’s the final scene of 2010’s Post Mortem, the second and most devastating film in Larraín’s loosely defined trilogy, that most directly realizes the sense of psychological impermanence with which the filmmaker appears to be wrestling. A static, six-minute shot of man systematically trapping the object his affection and her lover inside a small shelter by piling debris in front of its door doesn’t, at first blush, seem a likely conduit for such a provocative representation of a country in the throes of decline. It’s Larraín’s attention to the personal ramifications of the era’s political practices, along with the aesthetic establishment of mood and the narrative organization of his characters’ everyday lives—in this case, the obsession a lonely morgue assistant named Mario (Alfredo Castro) develops for a local cabaret dancer (Antonia Zegers)—that creates a natural tension which ultimately begs for a relief that the director suggests may never arrive.

Far be it for me to speak too definitively about process, not being a filmmaker myself, but the degree of difficulty in effectively conveying a sense of both pregnant anticipation and, soon thereafter, fleeting hope seems especially pronounced when working in such a starkly realistic milieu. Without reasonable need to utilize the aesthetic resources which can help facilitate similar sentiments in more fantastical or, at the very least, operatic films, Larraín is left to coax genuine sensation from simpler tools. In Tony Manero, the first of his Pinochet-era films, it was through the specter of John Travolta’s Saturday Night Fever character, idolized and compartmentalized by Castro’s Raúl Peralta, another of Larraín’s lonely men, this time moonlighting as both a disco dancer and serial killer.

Meanwhile, for Post Mortem, Larraín creates his own city of living dead, a zombified population conducting day-to-day activities as if in drowned in hypnosis (Mario, already of ghostly visage, grows paler as the film proceeds). When the nascent political turmoil erupts in a series of bombings and protestations, Mario attempts to help his effected love interest by hiding her from further harm beneath a housing complex. The build-up is methodical, Larraín’s patient depiction of events a source of both intrigue and discomfort. (No, for its part, takes a less allegorical approach, detailing the campaign to rally support of the referendum which would lead to Pinochet’s removal from office).

Post Mortem’s final shot, then, comes not as relief but painful reconciliation, offering not closure but the advancing revelation that these characters—and, by extension, the Chilean people—are caught in an age of flux, unable to escape the collateral consequence of the era’s political upheaval. And after a couple minutes, as the realization sets in that this is more than likely the conclusion of the film—the tension by this point wound up like a knot—an unnerving sense of repose cuts the anxiety like a knife even as we sit knowing Mario is far from satisfied. For six minutes we’re caught in an intermediary moment for an entire country, trapped by Larraín’s widescreen composition—growing more suffocating by the second as Mario stacks junk across the frame—nowhere to go, held breathless until one final cut to black. [Fandor]

DVD Review: Eclipse Series 38 - Masaki Kobayashi Against the System [Criterion]

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 01:47:00 +0000

By the mid 1950s, the Shochiku Studio house style was well established. Built on the efforts of such icons as Yasujirō Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, as well as lesser-known masters like Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, Shochiku trafficked in intimate, humane storytelling, with a distinct thematic tendency toward the familial and inspirational. During the occupation, these types of films weren't only encouraged, but required by the Allied powers, which strictly regulated all facets of Japanese media and entertainment. It's understandable, then, that in the years following World War II, filmmakers would feel prompted, if not obligated, to confront the atrocities of the war and the effects it had on Japan's economic, corporate, and cultural strata, which would hit punishing lows before admirably rebounding over the second half of the 20th century.

Perhaps the most important director to emerge during this period was Masaki Kobayashi, an aspiring filmmaker who in 1941, upon entering the Shochiku fold as an apprentice, was drafted into the Japanese army. After five years of reluctant service, including time as a prisoner of war, Kobayashi returned incensed, motivated, and more importantly, ready to create. Yet Shochiku, of rather prestigious pedigree when compared to more liberal contemporary studios such as Nikkatsu and Daiei, both of which would distribute similarly penetrating works by Kon Ichikawa and Yasuzo Masamura during this same era, wasn't yet of equal critical mind to that of Kobayashi, whose passion nonetheless needed an outlet. Between an early run of assistant jobs and his own initial forays into mild-mannered studio assignments, however, Kobayashi was able to shoot The Thick-Walled Room, a fiery exposé about a camp of POWs awaiting trial as their superiors seemingly work in tandem with American officials to ensure their demise.

But in 1953, this was material that no studio could touch, and The Thick-Walled Room was held from release for three years. In a weird sort of symmetry, however, 1956 would prove to be an auspicious year for Kobayashi, as three films bearing his directorial signature would end up seeing release. I Will Buy You, Kobayashi's first great film, found the newly inspired director initiating a practice which would serve him well over the course of his career: By folding his critique into the fabric of less outwardly political material (whether, as in the case of I Will Buy You, the world of professional sports, or the fantastical or historical milieus of his later work), Kobayashi was able to construct equally incendiary films of more relatable substance as they dealt head-on with modern-day Japan. For its part, I Will Buy You utilizes a fairly simple story of a baseball scout attempting to sign a hotly tipped college prospect to detail the greed and moral corruption in a profession nominally geared toward entertainment. What results is a subtly dramatic, morally complex tale of loyalty that forgoes the conciliatory in favor of the tragic.

Ambitious and darker yet, Black River would follow in the months soon after, and more accurately than any of Kobayashi's early films points toward the nascent Japanese New Wave which would stake an even more unruly stance at the dawn of the '60s with films by Koreyoshi Kurahara and Nagisa Oshima, among others. A volatile, emotionally turbulent portrait of lower-class life on the outskirts of U.S. military bases in the wake of the war, Black River teems with a barely contained energy that would come to mark the next decade in Japanese film. Starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Kobayashi's greatest muse, in his first role for the director) as Killer Joe, a mid-level yakuza as obsessed with overtaking a seedy apartment complex as he is causing a rift in the burgeoning love affair between a young student and his girlfriend, herself as enticed as she is skeptical of the suave, serpent-like Joe, the film creates a tense canvas of discomfort, operating by an internal logic all its own. With its deft balance of multiple intersecting story strands and a slow-simmering sense of squalor and unease, Black River plays like an antecedent to the works of New Wave rebels Shōhei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki, whose The Pornographers and Gate of Flesh, respectively, feel like natural descendants of Kobayashi's final film of '56.

It would be another six years before Kobayashi would return to such small-scale drama. In the years between Black River and 1962's brilliant morality play The Inheritance, Kobayashi devoted his energy to The Human Condition, a three-part, nine-hour war-time epic that would prove one of Eastern cinema's most substantial achievements. As overwhelming and impressive as every minute of The Human Condition is, however, there's certain charm to Kobayashi's more modestly mounted endeavors that was understandably lost in the expansion. Whether a retreat from such a massive undertaking or simply a brief return to his roots (tellingly, Kobayashi's next three films—Harakiri, Kwaidan, and Samurai Rebellion—would re-adopt such daunting proportions, resulting in his most financially successful period), The Inheritance plays like a refinement and reconciliation of the director's talents up to that point.

A severe indictment of material thirst and bourgeois entitlement, the film pits half a dozen characters (including Nakadai and Kurosawa regular Minoru Chiaki) in a game of deceit and one-upmanship over a dying businessman's inheritance. The lengths these characters go, and the moral roadblocks they must patently ignore, to simply extort additional funds from an estate they're all already partially entitled to anyway is both damning in its focus and uncomfortably universal in its application. That the most cunning of these participants turns out to be the most initially unassuming—and that her supposed identity is revealed in the very first scene of the film, establishing skepticism on the part of the viewer before the plot is even underway—feels like one last joke on the part of Kobayashi, whose own sly incriminations would continue to resonate as an essential facet of his work for the remainder of his career, though at never at such a personal, distressing register.

Image/Sound:
Packaged together in Criterion's 38th Eclipse box set, The Thick-Walled Room, I Will Buy You, Black River, and The Inheritance all make their debut on North American home video in traditional DVD format. Considering the sources and lack of a complete restoration, many of the four pictures' deficiencies, particularly the three 1956 releases, can be forgiven. The Thick-Walled Room survives in the weakest state, with multiple instances of scratches and inconsistent contrast. The quality gets better as we move along though. I Will Buy You is still muddy on occasion, exhibiting some wear and tear inherent to the print. Luckily, Black River makes a virtue of such imperfections, engulfing much of the action in nighttime exteriors and shadowy tenements. The Inheritance, meanwhile, looks predictably strong as it coincided with Masaki Kobayashi's assent to larger Scope productions. Sound fares about the same, progressively improving as technology and production values evolved over the years. All dialogue is upfront and clear with whatever outside aural elements clouding the mix a similarly natural byproduct of the materials at hand.

Extras:
As per Eclipse standards, there are no digital supplements to note. There are, however, typically informative and well-researched liner notes provided for each film by Michael Koresky.

Overall:
Masaki Kobayashi's sly incriminations would continue to resonate as an essential facet of his work for his entire career, though never at such a personal, distressing register as these four early films made for Shochiku Studios. [Slant]

DVD Review: Hong Sang-soo's In Another Country [Kino Lorber]

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:48:00 +0000

South Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's work is built on the concept of repetition. Yet within these constructs he's produced infinite variations on a very specific set of themes. Nearly all of his films feature a break (or breaks) in the narrative, after which either perspective pivots, characters undergo a change in interest or motivation, or the story itself begins a process of refraction wherein individual threads collapse into or are set into relief by each successive alternation. The episodic nature and modest aestheticism of his cinema has led many to reduce his output to a series of retreads and reassemblies of past successes, ignoring the fact that the main thematic concern of Hong's career has thus far hinged on this very preoccupation with personal inquisition, reminiscence, and reevaluation.

Last year's In Another Country was met with a similar sense of the expected, which, coming after a trio of some of his most complexly structured films (HaHaHa, Oki's Movie, The Day He Arrives), is somewhat understandable. After all, more than most of his work, In Another Country plays like a riff on familiar Hong tropes, a triptych narrative set against a beachside backdrop featuring recurring characters who drink, obsess, and confess a little too much as they search for emotional reconciliation. It also happens to be one of Hong's most effortless triumphs, a primary-colored comedy which nonchalantly dispenses hard truths, uncomfortable revelations, and spontaneous laughs.

Hong's 2006 film Woman on the Beach is set in a similar locale, emphasizes color to a corresponding degree, and features an assortment of characters who act on impulse (most often to their detriment), resulting in a quasi love-triangle narrative which In Another Country also employs in an array of configurations. Meanwhile, 2010's HaHaHa established a framework for his characters to recollect events from differing perspectives, a structuring technique which In Another Country references even as it simplifies the device. Here we have a young screenwriter notating different scenarios for a film starring a French woman traveling through Korea who unintentionally invites the gaze of a series of men who have more than a little trouble handling the emotional ramifications of their infatuation.

And here's where perhaps In Another Country's principal visual interest lies: in that of its star and cinematic cultural ambassador, Isabelle Huppert. She's present in nearly every frame of the film, and all three of her characters (a director, a divorcée, and an adulteress, all named Anne) are portrayed in a fashion that romanticizes her pedigree while casually neglecting her conscious role in each scenario's romantic entanglements. As one might expect from the various heritages of the ensemble, this is, by necessity, Hong's first film to be spoken primarily in English, though he exploits the second-language limitations of his actors to great comedic effect. Naturally, they all attempt to meet in the middle (English), yet their miscommunications quickly reveal the film's primary theme, that of linguistic nuance and the folly of interpersonal expression.

As each man inevitably falls for Anne's latent charms (first a married man with a pregnant wife, then an endearingly earnest lifeguard, then a filmmaker researching his next project, then another married man with a pregnant wife, all played by the same actors in a succession of variations on their own roles from preceding chapters), the film builds up a casual energy imbued with a lightness of touch, but an underlining sadness. This faint sense of discontent tends to emerge in moments of awkward exchange, such the lifeguard's continued attempts at wooing Anne, the married men who continually ignore their wives for the temporary pleasures of the exotic, or, most disarmingly, a monk who betrays the trust of a friend in an effort to ameliorate the discomfort of their visitor.

Hong continually sets up then undermines audience expectations in each situation, even at one point going so far as to present Anne's imaginary rendezvous as a real event so as to establish yet another layer of (meta-)awareness while emphasizing his medium's ability to more precisely communicate gradations in passion—and then to cheekily end the segment with the actual liaison anyway. To that end, if the mark of a great movie is the intangible sense that you could watch it forever, then In Another Country certainly fits, sets, and fulfills the criteria. And luckily, with Hong, more so than with any filmmaker of the modern era, we can get surprisingly close to actually experiencing this uniquely cinematic feeling.

Image/Sound:
Having been luckily enough to see In Another Country in 35mm, I can vouch for its status as Hong Sang-soo's most visually stimulating film to date, full of bright hues and carefully coordinated color schemes. It's unfortunate, then, that Kino Lorber has decided against offering the film on Blu-ray. As far as DVD transfers go, however, this is very solid, with acceptable contrast and noticeable grain. Colors pop to a satisfying degree and the picture is clean and devoid of any print damage. Sound, meanwhile, receives an unexpected (though mostly unnecessary) 5.1 mix. As any Hong devotee can tell you, there isn't much in the way of action in his films. Nevertheless, the mix is clear with dialogue pushed up front, while some of the beachside ambiance skirts the outside channels to pleasurable effect. Overall, this is a modest presentation of a modest film.

Extras:
None, which is a particular shame when considering this is the most widely seen film of Hong's career thus far.

Overall:
One of Hong Sang-soo's most effortless triumphs, a primary-colored comedy which nonchalantly dispenses hard truths, uncomfortable revelations, and spontaneous laughs. [Slant]

Record Review: Marnie Stern - The Chronicles of Marnia

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:40:00 +0000

History tells us that artists with an experimental lean tend to topple toward the middle over time, losing a once-unique edge in an effort to curb artistic stagnation or simply as a means of courting a wider listenership. At first blush, the career of Marnie Stern would seem to bear out this trajectory. The treble-voiced, finger-tapping, endearingly self-deprecating New York-based guitar hero has moved breathlessly across a trio of albums with nary a pause for traditional considerations such as melody or structure. That she’s gathered both in intermittent fits of inspiration over the years certainly speaks to her natural talent, yet both have, up to now, felt more like natural by-products of her process rather than premeditated goals. Which is more than fine: each of Stern’s records have provided more than their share of thrills and heart-stopping flourishes, and as a technician she may be the most naturally gifted guitar player of her generation. Nevertheless, she seemed to be exhausting her formula a bit on her 2011 self-titled album. The less defined, more freewheeling moments in her past work were easy to forgive for an artist still presumably finding her footing. But more recently these same feats of strength had begun to feel less like displays of unchecked passion and more like a crutch.

Which is what makes Stern’s amazingly titled new album The Chronicles of Marnia such a refreshing listen. Not so much a change of pace as a consolidation and careful re-allotment of her powers, Chronicles is unique in that it doesn’t represent a stylistic 180 or drastic overhaul of Stern’s sound, but instead finds her integrating her unique ingredients into fresh, streamlined concoctions. Working with Oneida drummer Kid Millions after years battling against the currents of torrential fury whipped up by Zach Hill (now of Death Grips infamy), Stern has finally found a running-mate rather than a foil. Granted, much of the excitement generated by the band’s prior set-up was a direct result of the tension spark by Stern’s guitar reacting unpredictably to Hill’s free-assault percussion. Millions may be more of a finesse player (though compared to Hill, nearly every drummer can sound dainty), but he’s far more equipped at harnessing a groove without sacrificing the momentum so essential to Stern’s headlong fury. What they’ve emerged with is Stern’s first collection of songs, ten carefully plotted tracks with an emphasis on craft and internal harmonization.

Lest one think Stern is following the path established by that of her many forebears, Chronicles is frontloaded with a handful of her most dizzying yet immediately satisfying tracks to date. In fact, the opening volley of songs might each be what one might refer to as—depending on how liberal your definition—jams. Opener “Year of the Glad” announces itself auspiciously, with Stern wordlessly yelping atop Millions’ galloping beat. “Everything’s starting now,” Stern chirps between successful attempts at turning monkey noises into a hook, and in less than four minutes she’s ran through a verse, a chorus, and a bridge without breaking much of sweat. Her guitar bends like taffy throughout “You Don’t Turn Down,” scurrying from colossal, power-chorded peaks through naked, strummed valleys, her lyrics about emotional congestion mirroring her and Millions’ dynamic gait. “Noonan” similarly trots with confidence as Stern sings, “Don’t you want to be somebody,” as if she’s now fully found her voice and is offering encouragement to those inspired by her fearless evolution. “Nothing is Easy” and “Immortals” are a closer approximation of what we’ve come to expect from Stern, mantra-like and slightly mannered, but with a continued air of the inspirational (“You don’t need a sledgehammer to walk in my shoes” goes the former; “I’ll come and find ya,” the latter).

The second half of the record sees the duo losing a bit of the momentum built up by the opening gambit. The title track promises a continuation of the chiseled, energetic outbursts of the proceeding side but instead has to play as a shot of adrenaline to last for the next fifteen minutes or so. “Still Moving” doesn’t quite live up to its title, loosening the grip on the more structured principles employed earlier, while “East Side Glory” finds Stern delivering her most conventional riff alongside a sing-song melody that (perhaps intentionally) lacks the conviction of her more demonstrative work. And then “Proof of Life” rumbles to life on the back of storm-gathering percussion and (…wait for it) concentrated piano chords. Thankfully Stern and Millions mostly come through on the drama, building to an emotional and musical climax by simply flashing rather than overextending their chops. Stern’s repeated request of “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon” on closer “Hell Yes,” then, works as both reestablishment and reminder of her most efficient gear: “All I’ve got is time,” Stern defiantly proclaims as her guitar careens alongside Millions’ advancing army of a beat. And hopefully with a little more, Stern and her new partner will learn to spread this restless spirit evenly across the length of a collaboration. [CMG]

Blu-ray Review: Luis Buñuel's Tristana [Cohen Media Group]

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:40:00 +0000

Director Luis Buñuel's first four films were made in three different countries. By the time he reached the peak of his international renown in the mid 1960s, he could rightly be considered the most cosmopolitan of art-house filmmakers. In fact, few directors embody the slightly indeterminate "world cinema" tag more than Buñuel. It's ironic, then, that this iconoclast of Spanish cinema produced only three films in his native country. All three of these disparate projects, however, would prove important. The first, Land Without Bread, evidenced Buñuel's initial move away from surrealism toward a more realist-based approach; the second, the landmark Viridiana, brought the director once and for all to the forefront of the international cinema circuit, a position he would only relinquish upon his death in 1983. But Buñuel made one last momentous return to Spain in 1970 with Tristana, a multi-national production starring a French ingénue and a veteran of Spanish theater and television.

As in much of Buñuel's preceding work, the film's ingredients don't immediately appear compatible. Yet by this point in his career he was a master of balancing divergent elements. And indeed Tristana would prove to be one of Buñuel's most visually uniform, thematically and stylistically streamlined efforts to date. But if his aesthetic and authorial control over the production translated rather seamlessly, it was in stark contrast to his lead characters, a pair of contradictory, at-once sympathetic and deplorable would-be lovers as tragically dependent on one another as they are helplessly constrained by their vain attempts at emotional and physical independence. In the title role, Catherine Deneuve undergoes a transformation, both physically and psychologically, of near-unparalleled complexity. Fernando Rey, meanwhile, as the totalitarian Don Lope, evolves in less demonstrative fashion, yet is doubly hypocritical, a weak soul with a brutish façade who preys on a young girl's naïveté with grave consequence.

As the film opens, we're met with a calming air of grace as Tristana dutifully attends to the needs of a group of disabled school kids, her life of even greater servitude hinted at straight away before we eventually learn of her debt to Don Lope, who, as her guardian, has brought this wide-eyed young lady into his life of bourgeois comfort. What transpires is a meticulous game of psycho-sexual cat and mouse across the cramped streets of Toledo and among the far more constricting confines of Don Lope's house. Even from early on Tristana envisions the man's death; the recurring image of his severed head swung pendulum-like from a church bell is a genuinely unsettling manifestation of her inner turmoil. And yet Don Lope seems to have her best interests in mind as he offers advice and provides for her every need. What happens behind closed doors is another matter, however, and it's through Buñuel's delicate handling of his subject that not only does Don Lope remain tolerable, but even identifiable at times.

Don Lope's penance is certainly paid by film's end, though by that point the roles have been almost imperceptibly reversed, leaving Tristana not only as an antagonist, but something of a vigilante as well. As complacency sets in following her escape from Don Lope's possession (her secret, stale lover, played by Franco Nero, is as noticeably offensive to her sensibilities as her devious caretaker once was), a tumor materializes to push her toward rock bottom, seemingly taking her leg as sacrifice for the vengeance she hopes to enact on her former keeper. But her return feels as inevitable as Don Lope's demise, the intertwining of their fates ordained even as their motives blur and begin to take the narrative far from its intimate origins. That Buñuel is able to accomplish this through only a handful of stylistic gestures speaks to both his foresight and execution, a game of interpersonal chess taken to tragic ends without so much as leaving a small-town setting or introducing many peripheral characters.

If Buñuel indeed proscribed to Pascal's notion of extremities eventually coinciding, as Budd Wilkins suggested in his recent review of That Obscure Object of Desire, then Tristana may be the most of devastating example of the theory. Both Tristana and Don Lope are strong characters, though rarely at the same time. In fact, they seem to thrive on the other's weaknesses, keeping each other alive and motivated until one realizes the innate potential of their inner passion and usurps the willpower of the other. It's not a particularly hopeful message, but it's a fundamental truth we as viewers should hope to confront and conquer early on in our personal maturation, and hopefully not at the expense of another person. Thus, if Buñuel's widespread output doesn't attest to art's continued ability to transcend borders, then these concepts certainly do.

Image/Sound:
Cohen Media Group's Tristana Blu-ray marks not only the debut of the film in high definition, but on Region 1 digital video. The import DVDs were themselves nothing special, but this 1080p upgrade (sourced from the same transfer that provided Criterion with their laserdisc back in the 1990s) tightens the picture considerably, accentuating the earthy color palette, balancing contrast while heightening black levels. There's even a thin layer of grain and some noticeable depth present, all preserved in the original 1.60:1 aspect ratio. Audio, meanwhile, is presented in a more than adequate lossless DTS track. There's very little in the way of demonstrative sound in Tristana, but there are subtle effects, particularly during the dream sequences, which the track handles well enough. Both the original Spanish and English dubs are presented, with voices audible and upfront and with no undue noise to note. The limitations of the source may ultimately curb the A/V potential of this release, but compared to what, if anything, you may have previously seen on home video, this is a marked improvement.

Extras:
Extras are slim but essential. The highlight is a feature-length audio commentary by Catherine Deneuve and critic Kent Jones. It plays more like a Q&A session with Deneuve than an in-depth analysis of the film, but it offers plenty of anecdotal entertainment with a bit of contextual information emerging as a natural by-product of the conversation. On the more critical end of the spectrum is a 30-minute interview/visual essay on the film with Luis Buñuel scholar Peter William Evans. He deconstructs themes, visual cues, and the film's relation to the director's prior work, making a pretty strong case for the film as one of Buñuel's most significant achievements. In addition to the requisite trailers, there's also a brief alternate ending included, which was originally used in the European version of the film; it's a little less elliptical, but no less bleak than the international ending. Finally, there's an insightful booklet appended to the package, featuring a new essay by critic Richard Porton, an excerpt from Raymond Durgnat's Luis Buñuel, and entries from Deneuve's diary kept during production. All in all, it's a worthy helping of material for a film not often considered in the same thorough manner as Buñuel's more popular works.

Overall:
Luis Buñuel made one last momentous return to Spain in 1970 with Tristana, a multi-national production starring a French ingénue and a veteran of Spanish theater and television that would prove to be one of his most scathing, personal works. [Slant]

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 01:30:00 +0000

I wrote this brief description of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom for the Cinefamily repertory theater, who are hosting a 35mm midnight screening of the film on April 24rd, 2013.

Arguably the original arthouse video nasty, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—the Italian iconoclast’s final film, and infamous transposition of the Marquis de Sade’s “School of Libertinism” texts—brought a career of sexual, religious, and political provocation full circle. Structured as a visceral four-part rite of passage through Dante’s Circles of Hell, the film depicts in unflinching detail the systematic sexual torture and mental abuse perpetrated on a group of teenagers kidnapped by libertine fascists in the wake of the Mussolini regime. Igniting the ire of government officials and Italian Social Republic extortionists before the film had even wrapped, Pasolini’s impassioned portrayal of rape, sadism, sodomy, and murder would, along with his ties to Communism, eventually lead to his murder in the months leading up to the film’s premiere. Whether seen as an allegory of Nazi Germany, a ritual of spiritual agnosticism or a blatant authorial affront, Salò remains a nightmarish vision of inhumanity, and a midnight movie of grave allure and enduring implication. [Cinefamily]

Fandor Feature: Scenes - The Strange Case of Angelica

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 09:54:00 +0000

The cinema of Manoel de Oliveira is one of perspective. Not from the vantage of the 104-year-old centenarian himself—though that’s an inevitable thematic by-product for a filmmaker whose career dates back to the silent era—but that of his camera and, by extension, his characters who gaze at, through, or in discrepancy with Oliveira’s frame. His late work in particular has taken his typically strategic approach to directional composition to uniquely playful ends, suggesting at once a much younger artist and one who has accumulated decades of narrative and stylistic skill. At any given point in these films the viewer may be placed inside the protagonist’s head—via either voiceover, flashback, or point-of-view set-ups—spatially removed from the action to observe objectively from a static position, or put in direct eye contact with a given character, which often leads to further inquiries regarding omniscience or simply the role we play in completing said portrayal.

Oliveira’s 2010 film, The Strange Case of Angelica, is a particularly fascinating study in visual schematics, as it continually proposes familiar devices for representational engagement only to subvert the typical function of these aesthetic constructions. Befitting its fantastical milieu, Oliveira’s fable, concerning the plight of an emotionally wayward photographer named Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa) who’s commissioned to capture the radiant visage of the young Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala) who has passed away under mysterious circumstances, engages with an entire spectrum of antiquated, classical and modernist cinematic resources. At various instances Isaac can be seen gazing purposefully through the eye of his camera (both at Angelica, who seems to smile at him as he frames his shots, and a group of laborers tilling the nearby countryside), yearningly out the window of his rented flat, or passionately into an indeterminate emotional—possibly physical—space just off camera.

Oliveira instills doubt in the viewer’s response to these episodes just as he does in Isaac by eliding definitive proof of their occurrence—or, more specifically, the consequence of their occurrence as Isaac appears to experience them on screen. About halfway through the film Isaac encounters the most perplexing of all his visions as he awakens from his sleep to find Angelica’s glowing silhouette before him in life-like form. As he’s spent the entirety of the film up to this point yearning for Angelica through the frozen beauty of his photographs, the moment is met for both him and the viewer as a magical realization of his innermost desire. Instinctively embracing Angelica, the two ascend from Isaac’s balcony as the digital photography subtly de-saturates and the pair are left to float across the horizon bathed in radiant, oceanic black-and-white. Audio is likewise discarded and before long it’s apparent that what is transpiring is reconciliation both for Isaac, whose emotional and mental obsession meet physical manifestation head-on, and for Oliveira, whose roots as a silent cinema practitioner flower forth in spiritual accord with his seasoned, formalist sensibility.

The purposefully antiquated techniques Oliveira utilizes during this sequence are part and parcel of the world he’s created. Isaac works with an vintage camera, the tools of the hillside laborers he documents equally outdated (“Old fashioned work interests me,” he justifies), while the apartment where he resides is bereft of most modern conveniences (early on in the film he’s seen fiddling with an antique radio) at the same time that the language spoken amongst the townsfolk tends toward the arch and unfashionable. In lieu of Oliveira’s modernist methodology, the influence of one time contemporaries Fritz Lang and Georges Méliès manifest in its stead. The latter proves a particularly apt touchstone, as Oliveira’s crude visuals—aerial wire rigging, rear-screen projection, matte drawings (or, at the very least, computer generated approximations of these effects)—feel as if they’ve been inspired by Méliès’s many impossible voyages and proverbial trips to the moon. This is not the first time Oliveira has referenced his cinematic heritage—the makeshift backdrops and absurdist nightmare designs of The Satin Slipper and The Cannibals, to name but two examples, point toward a bygone era of hand-crafted filmmaking—but in many ways this feels like the purest expression of this legacy.

And yet another look at how Oliveira frames this sequence throws the implications of Isaac’s experience into sharp relief. Isaac eventually awakens from his night flight with Angelica as if from a dream; so lucid, in fact, that he wonders aloud, “Could I have been to that place of absolute love I’ve heard about?” As we have witnessed life-like mannerisms from a seemingly inanimate Angelica in prior scenes, we’re inclined to accept her appearance as depicted, even in a form resembling a ghost. But then Isaac never stops questioning his visions even as he continues to pursue a likely futile goal, suggesting that we should perhaps be equally skeptical such occurrences. As the scene opens and Isaac rises from his slumber, he approaches a wardrobe at the foot of his bed, staring at an angle into a mirror which appears to be inviting him to open his subconscious. If this is indeed a dream, where does it begin? And if not, are Isaac’s illusions limited to solely to his purview?

In the film’s final shot, we see a presumed-dead Isaac arise yet again from unconsciousness at the second appearance of Angelica on his balcony, a bedside doctor seemingly in position to notice this intersection of the mortal and the spectral. But he’s struck by an involuntary blow from Isaac, his glasses falling to the floor, thus impeding not only his chance at glimpsing this phenomenon but the viewer’s opportunity at contextual reassurance as well. Real or imagined Isaac and Angelica will live on together in eternity, Oliveira seems to be implying, our emotional correspondence shaped by his refusal to offer concrete designations between life and death, fantasy and reality. Like Isaac, he’s left us in the throes of ambiguity, our innate understanding of these events the only honest viewpoint from which to proceed forth from this strange case of resurrection and release. [Fandor]

Indiewire Feature: How to Make the Transition from Indie Film to TV: 5 Things We Learned From Our Panel With the NYTVF

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:51:00 +0000

Over the past few years, television's begun to challenge film as the preeminent outlet for American storytelling, the breadth of interest and means of distribution at an all-time high for a medium that can no longer be looked at as of inferior artistic merit. While mainstream film is driven far more by a focus on box office receipts than quality, the small screen has quietly matched (and in some cases usurped) Hollywood as a vehicle for both widespread popularity and artistic dignity. And as industry interest in and funding for mid-budget films wanes, TV has become an ever more attractive place for independent filmmakers looking to work with more resources and to have a platform to which millions of homes across the country have easy access.

In a panel discussion last night in Los Angeles presented by Indiewire and the New York Television Festival, speakers from diverse corners of the entertainment industry gathered to discuss the changing tide of the TV industry, and how in many cases indie filmmakers have looked to cable and network platforms to realize projects that might otherwise languish in cinematic purgatory. The panelists were Susie Fitzgerald, AMC's SVP of scripted programming; Ray McKinnon, the creator/executive producer of Sundance Channel's upcoming drama "Rectify"; and Tom Young, a scripted TV agent at CAA. Indiewire's Dana Harris served as the moderator. Here's what we learned:

New developments in distribution have leveled the playing field.

All three of the panels participants agreed that thanks to advancements in distribution, including the proliferation of cable networks, the increasing value of original series and the rise of year-round programming, even the most provocative or niche concept can now potentially find a home. “No matter how crazy the idea, there’s someone out there that will hear it,” Young said encouragingly.

McKinnon himself had faith in this prospect while writing “Rectify,” believing that after the success of shows like “Mad Men,” that “someone might be open this type of storytelling,” wherein, figuratively speaking, “nothing happens.” And Fitzgerald admitted to AMC's similar interest in more edgy programming compared to that of the major networks. Young, however, offered some worthwhile perspective later in the evening, conceding to the fact that these programs also only appeal to very specific demographics--what he called “the New York and L.A audiences"--while there’s an entire Middle American audience "who still loves 'NCIS.'"

Television can offer different, expanded modes of storytelling.

Fitzgerald noted that TV, even at its most traditional, offers a “different way to tell a story.” Yet while that’s true in regard to its serialized nature, it's also, as McKinnon mentioned, of a complementary mindset to that of the movies. “The way stories are being told is similar to ‘70s filmmaking,” offered McKinnon by way of an example from Peter Bogdanovich’s early ‘70s watershed “The Last Picture Show.” He later mentioned how the episodic nature of television allows the writer a certain freedom that his days as an indie filmmaker couldn’t afford because of traditional durational expectations. “A film is an hour and 45 minutes or two hours,” but for a show like “Rectify,” which he had been “thinking about for 10 years,” TV provided an opportunity to develop story and character over a far greater time span. He compared television to literature, acknowledging that what we’re watching are “not so much episodes as chapters.” It’s perhaps these characteristics that led Young to proclaim that television is “no longer the red-headed step child” of the arts.

Television production is both liberating and a new challenge for artists arriving from film.

In what may have been the night’s most enlightening anecdote, Fitzgerald revealed that Frank Darabont’s original treatment for “The Walking Dead”--which Young noted was passed on by every major network, including NBC, twice--was problematic for AMC in a way that she hinted at earlier when describing their artistic M.O. Darabont’s pilot script basically moved from “action scene to action scene,” with little time for character development.

Sensing potential at the core of the concept, Fitzgerald had Darabont watch the entirety of “Breaking Bad” up to that point, encouraging him to heed the pace and attention to character relationships, something that would prove vital to the eventual success of “The Walking Dead." “It’s a huge mindset shift,” she continued. “The character needs to drive the story.” McKinnon agreed before expounding on the idea: “It’s a bigger machine than indie filmmaking--it’s more complicated,” he stated, noting the many behind-the-scenes channels that comprise a television enterprise. So while McKinnon has been granted more money that he ever was as an indie filmmaker, he has nevertheless had to adapt to a new model of TV production.

Viewing habits and binge-watching continue to have an impact on how television is made.

The new Netflix original series “House of Cards” was an inevitable talking point as the discussion moved toward the future of TV consumption. All agreed that home viewing DVD marathons have triggered a compulsive attitude in viewers. “It’s like crack. It’s binge-watching,” Young stated bluntly while observing how “24” was the first show to make use of its own narrative construction as an advantage in the marketplace, prompting communal viewing parties as interactive, extracurricular entertainments all their own. He credits Netflix and “House of Cards” for building on the model and “setting a new benchmark” by not only making an entire season available at one time, but by recruiting big name Hollywood figures like David Fincher and Kevin Spacey to entice curious viewers to take a gamble on an unknown viewing arrangement between distributor and audience.

Yes, television is a writers' medium.

One of the main points of emphasis when talking about the differences between film and TV production was the latter’s emphasis on writing. While the director tends to lend the authorial stamp to filmmaking, both Fitzgerald and Young singled out the writers as the driving creative forces behind TV. “The writer really is king,” Fitzgerald stated, while Young, as an example of the divide between the two modes of creation, cited the scene in “Adaptation” where Nicolas Cage’s screenwriter character arrives on set only to promptly be told to “go stand over there.” He then mentioned how this consistency is maintained, by employing less writers on more shows, which of course led many aspiring writers in the audience to ask questions about the best strategies to success in the industry.

Fitzgerald offered simple, straightforward advice: “Worry about your story first. Don’t try to tailor your script to the network,” remarking on how many scripts she’s had to read that are set in the 1960s or featured zombies simply because AMC airs both “Mad Men” and “The Walking Dead.” By way of experience--“Rectify” heard its share of “no thank you’s” on its way to finally being picked up--McKinnon offered encouragement: “Whether they buy it or not, they’ll respond to it. It’s a marathon.” Riffing on that idea, Young brought the evening to a close with one final bit of advice, one which could double as an analogy for TV's ascent to the forefront of the entertainment industry in recent years: “It’s not the military where you go up in rank every year. You can leapfrog people." [Indiewire]

Record Review: Pissed Jeans - Honeys

noreply@blogger.com (Stereo Sanctity) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 21:29:00 +0000

Matt Korvette may be skeptical of a majority of humanity, but rest assured he questions and second-guesses himself just that much more. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, the frontman for the Allentown, Pennsylvania noise-rock provocateurs Pissed Jeans outlined his contradictory persona rather humorously: “It’s easy to be this raging guy from up high, shooting thunderbolts down at everyone…But I’m right there thumbing through the organic bananas, too, wondering how I got here.” Then again: “If I jump in the audience and start spitting everywhere, I will be the 10,000th frontman to do that…But if I really call someone out and wish cancer upon them…that might make people’s ears perk up a little bit more.” So yeah, Pissed Jeans are a quintessential punk band: volatile, self-conscious, ethically conflicted. But what’s helped these guys standout over the last half-decade-plus is the way they’ve pitted these impulses against one another, allowing them to careen and combust alongside their even gnarlier post-hardcore afterbirth.

Honeys, the fourth and most streamlined record from Pissed Jeans to date, not only brings these concerns to the forefront, but all but forces one to consider the implications of each successive indictment. Again, Korvette takes aim at everyone and everything, including himself, but it’s important to note the self-deprecating humor which streaks the best of this material. In the past, these narratives have covered a narrow if universal spectrum of issues: ice cream, hair loss, massages, scrap-booking, sexual contrition. On Honeys, the subjects are more substantial, while Korvette reigns in some of his more unhinged vocal idiosyncrasies, deploying a series of vivid, tangible screeds with an emphasis on both personal and situational storytelling. “I swear it’s not you, it’s me,” Korvette explains on “Vain in Costume,” utilizing one of the most clichéd cop-outs; but in this case you want to believe him as he writhes in discomfort amidst the band’s headlong pummel. Elsewhere, on “Male Gaze,” he confesses, “I’m not innocent / I’m guilty,” another fairly hackneyed phrase. And yet considering the topic (the masculine tendency to objectify women), not to mention the context (the band’s place within such a testosterone fueled scene), it’s a noble admission and evidence of Korvette’s growing maturity as a songwriter.

Honeys also represents a tightening of Pissed Jeans’ instrumental attack. While this is still far from accessible alt-rock, these songs are noticeably focused and single-minded in approach. Hope for Men (2007), the band’s first widely heard album and first for Sub Pop, alternated between lacerating feedback scrawls and slow-drip audio collages, the latter what many might consider the aural equivalent of water torture. But I’d argue that Pissed Jeans were always at least partially about confrontation and provocation (see that band name, for one), and save for The Seer (2012), there may not have been a more visceral rock record released in the last five years. The follow-up, King of Jeans (2009), which now sounds transitional if still appropriately punishing, abandoned the experiments but lost steam after an incredible opening gambit of songs. So Honeys “fixes” these two problems, relegating Hope for Men’s sonic affronts to a brief segue (“Something About Mrs. Johnson”) while curbing some of the back-end sprawl of King of Jeans. Instead, Honeys maintains a pretty even keel throughout, which for these guys is a still rather furious assault. Which is to say Honeys will probably make your head bang at a steady clip rather than induce whiplash.

But what they’ve sacrificed in unpredictability and a certain dynamism they’ve more than compensated for in anecdotal imagination. This is the first Pissed Jeans record where Korvette really feels like the creative impetus behind the band’s personality. Which isn’t to say that the band isn’t there at any given moment to push Korvette kicking and screaming into conflict with his angst. “You’re Different (In Person),” a scathing and darkly comic portrait of emotional (mis)communication in the era of social media, pivots on a sharply escalating Duane Denison-like riff before revving toward the finish line on the back of serrated power-chords and Korvette’s exasperated enunciation. “Cafeteria Food” takes the opposite approach as the band falls into a churning, methodical tempo while Korvette details the aforementioned desire for a co-worker’s cancer diagnosis. And then there’s “Loubs,” Korvette and the band’s one concession to their more wanton instincts, protracting vowels (“I’m happ-aay as a claa-yum”) and vamping on a blues scale like Mark Arm fronting early-‘90s Royal Trux.

With that being said, the best tracks here tend to be the chiseled, sawed-offed punk barrages—appropriate, as this is Pissed Jeans’s most beefed-up production to date. Opener “Bathroom Laughter” continues the band’s streak of incredible, palate-cleansing introductions, as Sean McGuiness flails wild-armed all over his kit while Korvette seethes, spits, and screams, exorcising any last vestiges of youthful comeuppance he failed to dispense on King of Jeans. “Vain in Costume” gallops fleet footed on a heaving riff, mirroring Korvette’s vocal cadence in a weird sort of anti-melody, even as discernible words are few and far between. By contrast, Korvette’s thoughts are efficiently deduced and delivered on “Health Plan,” the record’s crazed climax and most lyrically and musically primitive moment. There’s apparently no fine print to consult in Korvette’s personalized HMO plan (“You want to know my secret / I stay away from doctors,” goes the fantastically blunt chorus), and if the band is likewise leaving anything to imagination, they sure as hell aren’t letting on. Before you know it, these guys are in, out, and have sodomized your dog, and you’re left with nothing more than a bewildered look of nervous pleasure plastered across your face. After all, for Pissed Jeans nothing is more political than the personal, and Honeys, more so than any of their albums thus far, provides similar moments of dumbfound enlightenment in the least pretentious, most considerate way possible for a band of everydudes with more on their minds bucking the system. [CMG]