Cosmic Reviews

Alicia Keys, "No One"

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:03:39 GMT

In terms of popularity, Alicia Keys' "No One" doesn't need reclaiming. It's bigger than several Beatles (Ringo, maybe George), and even Jesus is probably sick of it.

However, among music snobs who are wary of modern R&B - and I'd like to give myself a shout-out - the song might easily be dismissed as typical slow-jam dross. If not, then maybe the heavy-handed chorus has drilled into your brain, and you're sick of it.

All that said, though, I think it's a marvel. It's got layers of clever, from Kerry Brothers' insistent synth beat, to Keys' decorative piano lines, to the hilarious call-and-response vocals that jump out of the end of the song. And while the chorus is slightly bizarre, it sticks in my head without the robotic repetition of a Britney Spears song.

Keys' lyrics are high-school poetry, and I admit that she shouldn't be encouraged in that area. But there's something universal in them, and I can picture my old students wishing that we'd studied this song instead of, say, Walt Whitman. It speaks to the love they feel every day, which is as real as anything else out there.

Best of all, Keys delivers the song like it's the most important thing she's ever done. When she sings, she draws from the deepest possible point inside of her, and then she unleashes everything on the way out. It's her entire self, in four minutes of husky emoting, and I believe every drop of it.

The Clash (1977, American Version): An Appreciation

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 01:15:46 GMT

I am not punk. I probably had the chance to be punk, when I was young, middle class, white, and thought I was smarter than everybody. But I never ripped my jeans or wore a mohawk. People who did that were weird.

Even when I ran with complainers, we were more snarky than angry. The guys in Green Day grabbed guitars; I grabbed my pen and wrote subversive newspaper columns. Billie Joe Armstrong is probably a lot happier than me with how he spent the 90s, but that's neither here nor there.

The shame of my youth is that I just didn't care about much. I'd like to think that pop culture dulled my desire to change the world, but plenty of others don't hide behind that. I was just lazy and apathetic. Even now, when I believe in a whole lot more, I am more inclined to quietly live my values than shout about them.

In college, when you should care the most and be the angriest just for the hell of it, I was probably at my most apathetic. Improbably, that's when I discovered The Clash. Typically, I didn't hear about it from some anarchic friend; I bought it on the recommendation of my favorite online record reviewer. No actual words were exchanged as I learned about what would become one of my favorite albums.

Then, as now, I did not care for hard rock, music that is loud for the sake of being loud. I've suffered through enough punk bands who equate power chords and shouting with meaning and emotion. I'm not into Yanni, but my tastes run more towards the jangly, the intelligently poppy, bands who are a degree or two from The Beatles.

Despite all this, I loved The Clash then, and I still love it today. It is uncompromisingly punk, the apotheosis of a genre I normally can't stand. The guitars scream. The vocalist grunts. There are no love song lyrics, just machismo and seething anger.

Clash frontman Joe Strummer was the punk vocalist and rightful hero to people who worship his band's music. He wrote some smart, provocative lyrics and sold the other ones because he completely believed in them. His guttural screams were a put-on, but they leave almost every other punk singer sounding like a poseur.

Still, Strummer's greatest strength might have been understanding his limitations. He let Mick Jones, the real musical force behind The Clash, take control and craft riffs and melodies that still work today. Jones's guitar sears, rumbles, and squeals, and while he has a weak voice, he makes the most of his enthusiasm and naked emotion.

The cliche about punk was that nobody could play their instruments, and I've heard plenty of bands who live down to that. But The Clash were fucking good. The songs on their debut are multi-part, in different styles, with riffs that flow into one another and basslines that accentuate the power of the guitars.

Listen to the Beatles-derived backing vocals, or the Who-stolen riff that opens "Clash City Rockers". Jones was punk, but he was also a classicist who wanted his music to mean something when the problems of 1977 were consigned to the history books.

Jones and Strummer's songs still matter, not because of the lyrical content, but because they are intelligent hits of adrenaline. The best is "Complete Control", a charging rocker with diamond-sharp rhythm and bellowed frustration. "White Riot" and "London's Burning" are similarly fast and ferocious.

Throughout, there are more gems: the trilogy of chugging, stripped-down political anthems, "I'm So Bored With The USA", "Janie Jones", and "Career Opportunities"; the strummy, nihilistic "Hate And War"; the anthemic hard-pop of "Clash City Rockers".

"White Man In Hammersmith Palais" is a unique creation, a reggae-influenced, slow-building showcase for some of Strummer's smoothest rough vocals. Even Jones's slightly stupid "Jail Guitar Doors" works because of Mick's absolute belief in the punk aesthetic, epitomized by a snarling lyrical kiss-off before the last chorus. I would bet he didn't have the same rage in his thirties, but what's important is that he wedded the rage of his twenties to sounds he knew would last.

It hits me every time. I shout along with Strummer. I play air-axe along with Jones and bounce along to the hyper-tight rhythm section. I get angry about the stupidest things because the band so perfectly connects their misanthropic emotions to mine. When it's done, I travel back to my square existence, but I'm always glad I took the trip.

The Ronettes, "Baby I Love You"

Tue, 08 May 2007 01:14:41 GMT

I've spent the last several months burying my emotions, my naivete, my optimism, and my sense of romance. I am convinced those things will only hurt me over and over until I find the right person. Then we will inevitably break up, and they'll hurt me again.

I swear that if I'm stone cold and pragmatic, I won't get caught up in emotions that will continually crush me until there is nothing left.

As much fun as that sounds, I do it knowing that the real me is still breathing beneath all of that. He takes up more emotional room than I would like to admit. Sometimes my internal organs have to fight for space.

It's all deep down, but it's there, and some songs allow me to wallow in the more hopeful person I used to be. I grab onto those songs and hold them tight, the same way I probably will with a girl who dares to make overtures towards caring about me. The songs, at least, won't run away.

"Baby I Love You" is one of those songs. It might be the song that exemplifies romance to me. Not romance like dates and flowers, and not romance like adventure and conquering and slaying dragons - although the song has a little of those things.

It's romance in the unbridled, passionate, hella crazy teenage sense. It's the hopefulness, the not knowing, the endless sense of possibility. The urge to rip each others' clothes off even when you know it's wrong for so many reasons.

It's a feeling you are swept up in, one with no logic or reason, only the thing you swear is love until you are lying there, finished, and doubts enter your mind, then flutter away. It's not understanding the world and yet being so absolutely sure of what's in front of you.

In essence, it is pure, heart-on-the-line vulnerability - the thing I am filled with and still fear so much.

The song's lyrics are simple - it's the music and delivery that envelope me with every listen. It features my all-time favorite opening, indebted to the earlier, more iconic "Be My Baby" but then trampling all over it with crashing piano chords and skittering drums.

Ronnie Spector isn't the world's most technical singer, but it takes a special voice to make me and so many other guys fall in love from the opening note. She's innocence and longing and daintiness and pure yearning. It's everything I have to avoid yelling, "Stop pining! I'm right here!" from forty years away.

Surrounding her are Phil Spector's typically brilliant orchestration and cascading harmonies, which threaten to bury Ronnie but never come close to succeeding. Castanets crackle, and Hal Blaine's booming drums anchor everything.

Soon again, I will approach the world and girls with a steely face and a determination that nothing will pierce my emotional body armor. It's a sincere effort, but songs like this remind me that my facade is a lie that will inevitably crumble and disappear. I'll be a lot happier for it.

Dean Martin, "Memories Are Made Of This"

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 04:02:09 GMT

This is the sweetest, most sincere song, but there's an air of exploitation to it. Ostensibly, it's a standard ballad, one that expouses courtship, romance, eternal love. As with the Beatles singing that they want to hold your hand, though, it's a shameless attempt to pander to Dean's core audience of bored housewives.

It's a great lie: that Dean Martin, the coolest guy in the universe, James Bond on a nightclub stage, wants to marry you. He's got fame, fortune, and endless hours to play golf, but he'll give it all up to kiss you at the end of the working day. Not only does he want to impregnate you several times, but he's going to stick around and raise the children, too. No joke - he's settling down.

A dastardly untruth, then, but it's hard to argue with because it's such a perfect little song, and so unpretentiously arranged. Atop wispy backing vocals chanting the chorus, Dean's lilting vocals paint an irresistable picture of domestic bliss. He likely learned the song a few minutes prior to the session, but he sells it with his rippling sincerity and idiosyncratic phrasing. The song is instantly timeless, huge because of how much it packs into such a tiny frame. Hard to fault the lie when it sparkles so prettily.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:56:06 GMT

Directed by Peter R. Hunt
Starring George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas

(SPOILERS - I give away a significant plot secret)

To ensure the success of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, the producers threw together a first-time director, a goofy villain, and a James Bond who wasn't Sean Connery. Maybe they were just getting tired of the series. The result should be terrible. I should hate it. Instead, it's a lot of fun, two hours of thrilling action sequences and cheeky intrigue. I can't stand when life isn't predictable.

George Lazenby has long been the anomaly among Bonds, almost an urban legend who showed up and disappeared while Connery was off resting. Although his entry was the year's second-highest grossing film, it made half as much money as You Only Live Twice. Lazenby never again played Bond, convinced at the time that martinis and tuxedoes would have no place in the gritty 70's.

The kicker is that he's good, as exciting and appealing as any of the Bonds if not as definitive as Connery. He's smug, never losing his half-smile, but he backs it up with rough hand-to-hand combat skills (Lazenby was a black belt who studied with Bruce Lee). He's game for a joke, and he holds the viewer's attention through high-speed chases and subtle flirtations with Moneypenny. Lazenby has often said he should have made a few more Bond films, and I believe he would have thrived in the role.

The movie's actual plot is beyond pointless: something about Ernst Blofeld training a group of young women to spread deadly diseases around the world. But Bond plots don't matter, and this one doesn't get in the way of the usual super-villains (a hammy, barely believable Telly Savalas), exotic locales (the gorgeous Swiss Alps), and off-screen sex (three women, including two in a night!).

Being a Bond film, Secret Service has its share of absurd moments. There is an entire sequence in which Lazenby's voice is replaced by that of another actor. There are chase sequences on skis and in bobsleds that are excitingly shot and conceptually questionable. And then, there is James Bond's wedding, with M and Q in attendence and Moneypenny off to the side, weeping...

In fact, much of the movie is a love story between Bond and Tracy Di Vincenzo (Diana Rigg), a plucky but unstable countess. It's jarring to see James Bond fall in love like a common pansy, but it's also clear why Tracy is more intriguing than his usual bevy of walking bikinis. Their love builds slowly, and Lazenby plays tender better than Connery might have.

Naturally, Bond saves the world, but in the jarring final scene, Blofeld murders Tracy as she and James are riding off to their honeymoon. Her heartbreaking death might be the ultimate act of commercial pragmatism -- Bond can't be Bond with a wife and kids -- but it makes the tragic point that James Bond can never lead a normal life. He lets his guard down one time, only to lose everything. The movie's final moment, with Lazenby cradling Rigg's limp body, is one of the few truly poignant scenes in the entire series. For once, the producers let their guard down, too.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service could have been much shorter, and it lacks the actor-as-institution that would make it as timeless as some of the other entries. For those reasons, though, it isn't as mired in the usual assembly line. As an action epic with a likeable lead performance, it would likely have been successful and well-remembered even without James Bond hanging around its neck.

You Only Live Twice (1967)

Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:44:21 GMT

Directed by Lewis Gilbert
Starring Sean Connery

I enjoyed You Only Live Twice completely on its own merits, not because it is a Bond film that I was contractually obligated to watch, but because it is good. It is a breezy, refreshing take on a stodgy formula. Sean Connery is getting old and wrinkled, but the movie around him is fresh and exciting.

This is the first Bond film with significant amounts of beauty, with much of it shot on location in Japan. There is artfulness in the lush Japanese vistas, in the haunting Nancy Sinatra-sung theme song, and even in the way Japanese henchmen carry themselves with more grace and dignity than their Anglo counterparts. There is open space and sunlight, miles from the dark claustrophobia of From Russia With Love.

This time around, SPECTRE head Blofeld (a tame Donald Pleasence) has built a base inside a volcano on an island near Japan. He attmepts to ignite World War III by sabotaging American and Soviet spaceflights, provoking antagonism that will hopefully lead to armed hostilities. As America and Russia blame each other for the space disasters, Bond travels to Japan to find the real culprit.

Once there, he immerses himself in Japanese culture. Bond meets Tiger Tanaka (Tetsuro Tamba), head of the Japanese secret service (and an insultingly stereotypical "ninja school"). Throughout the movie, he teams with Tanaka, Aki (Akiko Wakabayashi) and Kissy Suzuki (Mie Hama) to foil Blofeld's attempt to remove his two biggest competitors in the world domination game.

Connery is starting to show his age and fatigue, and he temporarily quit the series after the film was released. He's dependably macho and game for all kinds of stunts, but he looks bored through much of the movie. And why not? From his end, minus the fast-paced editing and sweeping Japanese vistas, he'd certainly seen it all before.

This is Lewis Gilbert's first Bond film, and he surrounds those samey fights and interactions with legitimate attempts at art. He and scriptwriter Roald Dahl play with Bond conventions, placing M's office on a submarine and dressing the stuffy gadget master Q (Desmond Llewyn) in Bermuda shorts. The action sequences are ambitious, and the downtime, filled with Oriental touches, is relaxed and comfortable. There is the feel of a real movie, not just a James Bond adventure.

To be sure, You Only Live Twice has plenty of awkward moments. The shots of space capsules being swallowed are irredeemably cheesy, as is Bond's completely unnecessary Japanese mock-wedding, which devours much of the momentum Gilbert had built up. The movie's climax is a mixed-bag shootout between Tanaka's ninjas and SPECTRE's dutifully masochistic agents.

As with all battles in early Bond movies, it is grand in scope and somewhat clunky in execution. The studio spent millions of dollars choreographing the epic fight, and the stunt-villains still clutch their chests on cue, almost parodying dead instead of acting it. Gilbert intercuts huge, convincingly scary explosions with grainy stock footage of volcanoes erupting. As in the previous movies, it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the poorly-designed cardboard trees.

For all my complaints, You Only Live Twice might slide right behind Goldfinger as my second-favorite Bond film. It's not as clever or original, but it's also not the jammed-together bundle of special effects and alpha-manhood that sometimes passes for Bond movies. Something has to be said for shooting a real, enjoyable film when so much less would still have been successful at the box office.

Thunderball (1965)

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:53:42 GMT

Directed by Terence Young
Starring Sean Connery

James Bond movies are not great movies. That’s my epiphany after four films, nine car chases, three dozen quips, and more women bedded in eight hours than I will bed in my lifetime. James Bond movies are a lot of things, many of them good, but they are not art. They are more slick than deep, and often not even that slick. A story is told using a myriad of exciting sequences, with a healthy dollop of clunk thrown in. Ideas are freely cribbed from other movies in the series.

James Bond the icon exemplifies greatness, but he is not a complex person people can relate to. Often, he is often surrounded by hack filmmaking, or even trapped inside of a hack performance. That's not the case in Thunderball, but it's a constant danger in a series that emphasizes continuity and cool over the potential greatness of any given installment.

Thunderball is a really good Bond movie, so it ranks “just good” as far as normal movies are concerned. It’s fun, even enthralling. The ratio of inventive action sequences to disorganized dreck runs in the movie’s favor. Terence Young, director of Dr. No and From Russia With Love, returns with his workmanlike knack for giving moviegoers what they enjoy, free of both pretension and aspiration to better things.

In one of the better Bond plots, the evil organization SPECTRE steals two nuclear weapons and threatens to blow up two major cities unless a ransom is paid. In charge of this project is the eyepatch-wearing Emilio Largo. Awkwardly played by Adolfo Celi, he is still threatening for his sheer homicidal mania. In addition to his willingness to blow up entire cities, he dispatches his own underlings like they are used toothpicks.

I always wonder why these villains continue to work for SPECTRE. When I screw up at work, my boss sits me down for a talk. If I saw my fellow employees being electrocuted or thrown into shark tanks, I’d start sniffing around careerbuilder.com for new options in life. If my boss sent me off to try to kill James Bond, I’d run away and apply to accounting school. There, if I accidentally transpose some numbers, I might be demoted, but not ritually disemboweled as an example to the other workers.

Killing the bad guys nearly as fast as their boss is James Bond. He hits the ground running, murdering a crime boss in the movie's first scene, impaling another villain with a harpoon, and drowning more than can be counted in the movie's big underwater fight. He does it for King, country, and the sheer enjoyment of it all.

Connery plays Bond with the same aloofness he employed in Goldfinger. By now, he's magnetic enough to hold the viewer's attention without hogging the screen. It's not a brilliant performance, but it's flowing with enough confidence and knowing wit to be an iconic one.

Director Young only tries to better himself in one scene, in which Bond and love interest Domino embrace while scuba diving. Young pans beautifully to the sun shining through the water's surface, and we know that, well, our heroes are fucking. Subtle. There is an awkward sequence in which Bond escapes a predicament using a deus ex machina jet-pack, but most of Young's stunts come off well, especially underwater.

Best are several menacing encounters with sharks and a climactic undersea battle between SPECTRE and the US Army. By all rights, it shouldn't hold up today, but it does, if only for the sheer scope of having dozens of stuntmen clawing at each other ten feet below the ocean's surface. Having to be bigger and better with each installment brings out the inventiveness in a director.

Why, then, watch a slightly-above-average film like Thunderball? Well, for all the dull cinematography, awkward dubbing, and utter lack of soul, it’s still an exciting popcorn flick. James Bond is a textbook example of manhood, worth taking notes on or drooling over, whatever your preference. It's proof that a filmmaker can sometimes sleep comfortably after giving the people exactly what they want, which isn't always art.

Goldfinger (1964)

Sat, 06 Jan 2007 13:54:14 GMT

Directed by Guy Hamilton
Starring Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Frobe

Goldfinger is why James Bond movies were invented. Awkward and poorly edited in that early Bond tradition, it’s still a thrilling Bond flick and the best glimpse yet of Britain’s premier spy.

Where Terence Young simply told exciting stories, Goldfinger director Guy Hamilton brings a stylist’s touch to his film. He dwells on wide shots of his locations, whether Swiss roadways, Miami Beach hotels, or the kitschy suburban landmarks of Kansas, bringing authenticity to otherwise standard film sets. John Barry’s exciting soundtrack doesn’t overpower the film so much as subtly complement it. For the first time, it’s Bond as art.

Hamilton helms the first Bond plot that really matters, with our hero pursuing a megalomaniacal gold dealer intent on increasing his fortune. He soon discovers Goldfinger’s scheme to blow up Fort Knox – and kill 60,000 people in the surrounding towns – so he can increase the value of his own gold stores. Like the last two films, Goldfinger has Bond traveling the globe, but Hamilton smartly keeps Bond or Goldfinger in nearly every frame, giving the movie a linear focus Dr. No and From Russia With Love were missing.

Gert Frobe as Auric Goldfinger is the first iconic Bond villain. He’s all scowls and awkward moves, and there is a chilling ruthlessness beneath his portly exterior. Everybody is expendable in his quest for gold, and he's the first villain who seems committed to, and fully capable of, killing James Bond. When Goldfinger’s laser beam is aimed between Bond’s legs, even our star looks terrified, and he knows he’s going to be in the sequel.

Perhaps most importantly, Goldfinger’s innovations have become legendary. The theme song, belted by Shirley Bassey, is forced and bombastic, and all the more memorable for it. Oddjob is an absurd creation, but Harold Sakata is convincingly creepy as a mostly mute Korean who kills people with his razor-sharp derby. Meanwhile, Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore is the first women to match wits with Bond, a firebrand among skimpily-clad clones.

The standard car chases and military battles are excitingly executed, and the near-silent fight between Bond and Oddjob is a tense break from the bombastic action. Even a drawn-out game of golf keeps us rapt for the sheer tension between Bond and Goldfinger.

Contending for the first time with distinctive co-stars, Connery isn’t as much of a presence as he was in the first two movies. He holds up his end, though, slowly perfecting the scripted role he so memorably turned into a person. He’s quiet for much of the movie, but instead of preening, he sneers with understandable disgust at the villainy surrounding him. He’s convincing as a ruthless and resourceful spy, and as a connoisseur of wine and women. If he hates the Beatles, it's only proof that nobody is perfect.

The movie is dated, especially where some of the special effects are concerned, but Bond is all the more likeable for exemplifying an un-PC era. He shoos a girl from a conversation by slapping her ass and telling her he has to engage in “man-talk.” He nearly forces himself on Pussy Galore, a thinly-disguised lesbian for most of the movie, and she naturally succumbs to his charms. It would be insulting if Bond wasn’t fulfilling the secret desires of most of his male audience. He’s doing it because none of us can.

Goldfinger isn’t great filmmaking, but it is the spy movie genre near its peak. Never deep or believable, it’s a thrill ride of exotic locales, absurdly peacocked villains, and tense confrontations. Most importantly, it once again showcases James Bond, who commands respect even when he’s drowning in another awkward film. That most of Goldfinger isn’t awkward, but clever and visually rewarding, assures its place near the top of the Bond canon.

From Russia With Love (1963)

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 04:15:41 GMT

Directed by Terence Young
Starring Sean Connery

By now, Bond was a brand, and there is the slightest hint of formula in From Russia With Love. It's much more slick and assured than the clunky Dr. No, but it also lacks that movie's freshness.

As with Dr. No, the film's plot is oddly unengaging. SPECTRE, headed by the mysterious Blofield, has designs on a Soviet code-breaking machine. They trick a young Soviet agent (Tatiana Romanova) into offering the machine to British intelligence, with the caveat that James Bond himself has to pick it up. Once he arrives, they plan to steal the machine and kill Bond as revenge for the death of Dr. No in the first movie.

The code-breaking machine is simply a distraction -- we never see it in use -- that allows Young to concoct another fun spy movie based on Ian Fleming's novel. Bond travels from England to Turkey to Yugoslavia to Italy, dodging traps and devious Soviet agents. Every individual scene is clever and exciting -- embassies explode, Gypsy girls wrestle one another, boats engage in high-speed pursuit -- but Young sometimes falters trying to cohere them into a linear plot.

Connery has eased into the starring role, mugging less for the camera and working within his limitations. He keeps his declarations short and quiet, and he often has his back or side to the viewer. He's not self-consciously establishing a brand name so much as making subtle attempts to improve it. Young keeps him in the shadows, and he's more menacing for it. He's a secret agent at the top of his game, self-assured with nothing to prove.

From Russia With Love is darker than its predecessor, with much of the action taking place in the corridors of Istanbul, a far cry from the beaches of Jamaica. It works during the climactic fistfight with Grant, the movie's archvillain, in a train compartment, but elsewhere it's claustrophobic and hard to follow. Often, it's simply not as fun as watching characters frolic on the beach or wade through tropical swamps.

Neither Bond nor his enemies show much caution throughout From Russia With Love. Bond checks into hotels using his real name and discusses his dating exploits for a sizeable audience. Far from existing under the radar, he's famous enough that SPECTRE crafts their evil scheme around killing him. Does MI-6 really want an international playboy on their espionage payroll?

Similarly, SPECTRE agents have multiple chances to shoot Bond and get away scot-free. Instead, they indulge in elaborate murder plots that Bond foils by buying time with silly requests. If I wanted Bond dead, I'd shoot first and give him his last cigarette later. Then again, I saw the first movie, and SPECTRE's agents obviously didn't. They're convincingly scary as they stalk Bond from the shadows, but they're painfully bad at getting the job done.

With Young's crisp direction and Connery's magnetic confidence, the movie is a ride worth taking, and Pedro Armendariz as Bond's Turkish colleague brings welcome humor and lightness to his scenes. Without a gripping plot, though, and with villains who look sinister more effectively than they kill James Bond, it's hard to get too invested in From Russia With Love. It's Bond-by-numbers, which is a compliment given the talent of the artists, but frustrating given their wasted opportunity to create something new before the formula had completely hardened.

Dr. No (1962)

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:39:02 GMT

Directed by Terence Young
Starring Sean Connery, Ursula Andress, Joseph Wiseman

Dr. No is Bond before the world knew him, and before the movie's own success guaranteed that future outings would feed from its trough. In the beginning, James Bond cracked wise and sipped martinis because he wanted to, not because it worked fifteen films ago. He was an unknown striving to save the world and entertain us, not just trying to be James Bond, prefab superspy.

The movie establishes the series' tradmark inventive traps and chases, though the plot itself is oddly unexciting. A mysterious villain has an island hideout near Jamaica, where he is using radioactive power to disrupt the American moon launch. After the villain has a British spy murdered (in a clever sequence involving three blind beggars), Bond is sent to Jamaica to investigate.

Once there, he runs a gauntlet of the villain's underlings, surviving kidnappings, car chases, killer tarantulas, and a good, old-fashioned shooting. Aided by CIA man Felix Leiter (a refreshing Jack Lord) and Jamaican native Quarrel (John Kitzmiller), and eventually the tantalizing nymph Honey Rider (Ursula Andress), he infiltrates the villain's island, eventually meeting the man himself.

Though Dr. No (Joseph Wiseman) is nervously referred to throughout the movie, we only see him in the last few minutes. He's steely and emotionless, more icy than memorable, and his demise almost seems tacked on. Despite his elaborate, endlessly stalled execution plans for Bond, his henchmen come closer to success with arachnids and pistols, and it's much more fun watching them. Supposedly a criminal genius, the Doctor's entire operation is destroyed by a haggard Bond fumbling through his last chance at saving the day.

Sean Connery would go on to be the best Bond, but his first outing is a mixed bag. At the time, he was known only as a bodybuilder, and he spends as much time preening as he does acting. Clearly nervous, he's all superficial cool, hiding his fear and grunting his sentences one at a time.

Luckily for him, Bond isn't a complex human being, and at that point, Connery already exuded the toughness and suave magnetism that made him a natural physical presence. He hit the ground running as the character women wanted and men wanted to be.

If Dr. No is clunkier and more dated than later entries, it's also fresher and less pretentious. Sean Connery and director Terence Young were beholden to a popular pulp novel, but not to the expectations of millions of tradition-minded fans. History has proven that their improvisations had staying power, but failing that, they tried their hardest to create their own template for a fun movie.

Like Connery as Bond, the effect is that of an untested concept puffing its chest, walking tall, and acting as though it had been there all along. The ruse worked, and the brazenness of both film and actor laid the groundwork for dozens of copycats, some more artistically successful than Dr. No, but none as refreshing or eager to please.

A Perfect World (1993)

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 04:58:33 GMT

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner

A Perfect World fulfills the two criteria I have set for movies at this point in my life, namely that they keep me riveted, and that they have characters I care about. That Clint Eastwood kept me riveted without aliens or explosions, just human drama in dusty 1963 Texas, is a testament to his visual style and sense of pacing. That he made me care about a convict who, by his own admission, is not a good man, is a tribute to his willingness to present complex human beings where others give us black-and-white cliches.

Eastwood takes a small part in his own movie. Along with criminologist Laura Dern, he is in charge of hunting down Butch Haynes, who has taken an eight-year-old boy hostage after he and a fellow convict escape from jail (complete with a visual homage to my favorite Eastwood vehicle, Escape From Alcatraz).

Kevin Costner plays Haynes as a man in conflict with himself. Denied a childhood, he stil has an inkling of how his life could have gone in better circumstances. Where his fellow convict Terry Pugh (a creepy Keith Szarabajka) has grown into a sociopathic animal, Haynes respects those who have led the straight and narrow life he was denied. He takes what he needs and kills when he must, but his threats of violence are mostly empty.

Content with taking a young boy hostage, he is still protective of and affectionate towards his young companion. Together, they ride through the backroads of Texas, Haynes unsure how to relate to a son, the boy betraying his best instincts so he might make this new father figure happy.

Costner perfectly captures this mixture of guileless joy and cold menace. Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock created a character of such ambiguity, but it is to Costner's credit that we laugh with him, root for him, and ultimately hurt when his joyride comes to its inevitable end. Costner and the boy (a mature T.J. Lowther) are about as odd a couple as you will find onscreen, but by the end, their bond is believable and undeniable.

Their odyssey is intercut with scenes of Eastwood and Dern's pursuit. They are intent on ending the hostage situation, but they know, as we do, that there is more to Haynes than his actions would imply. Eastood and Dern are actors at the top of their game, but their scenes mostly flounder because the real action is with Haynes and the boy. A hostage movie needs police, but here, they are mostly a distraction from the film's emotional core.

This is a great film. It is small and unpretentious, just the story of normal people on a particularly exciting day. It meditates powerfully on the parent-child bond and man's violent nature, but Eastwood does not sledgehammer these themes into us. Mostly, it is simply riveting and emotional. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen, and the characters, especially Costner's ne'er-do-well, stayed with me after the credits rolled. So many films do not fulfill this criteria, but Eastwood shoots A Perfect World like there are no other reasons to make a movie.

King Kong (2005)

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 02:57:39 GMT

Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, Andy Serkis

It will be interesting to see how history remembers Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong. After Jackson's wild success with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, critics fell over themselves praising Kong, proclaiming it a classic that was not only technically spectacular but also emotionally moving.

Most of the normal people I talked to said it was good, not great, and nothing they'd line up to buy when it came out on DVD.

Why the discrepancy?

Jackson shot as high as the Empire State Building with his movie, throwing in every clever effect he could think of and trying to make it everything to everyone. There are dinosaurs and giant insects that never feel like rehashes of Jurassic Park or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. There are endlessly inventive fight scenes that make use of every nook and cranny of Skull Island and 1930's Manhattan, the movie's two main set pieces.

There are shipwrecks and creepy natives and, oh yeah, a really big ape. Modeled on actor Andy Serkis, Kong is at once terrifying and quirky, and perhaps a worthier star than the humans he terrorizes. In sum, when Jackson intends to give us a thrill ride, King Kong is every bit as exciting as he'd intended.

His skyscraper has a shaky frame, though, and that is where the movie falters. There are no memorable characters, just cartoons and cariacatures with simplistic motivations and lives we won't care about when the movie ends. What's worse is that Jackson knows this and plunges ahead anyway, giving his characters ominous, purposely cheesy dialogue where realistic words would have had more gravity. Jackson was trying to evoke an older time, but I have to believe that even seventy years ago, people had real hopes and dreams and weren't just cardboard archetypes.

It's a mistake, because a movie without people is a hard movie to love. Much was made of the love story between Kong and Naomi Watts' vaudeville performer Ann Darrow. While they do form a touching connection, if the best a movie can give us is an interspecies love affair, it is likely lacking an emotional core.

Given dialogue that no human being could convincingly utter, it's little wonder that the actors flounder. Adrien Brody does the best of the group on raw talent alone, but his character is such a blank that he's hard to get attached to. Jackson was criticized for casting Jack Black in a lead role, but given the superficiality of the movie, Black's sarcastic detachment fits in admirably. He has his tongue in his cheek; the actors who don't are the ones missing the joke.

Naomi Watts, meanwhile, is perfectly competent in a role that requires nothing but a despondent look and perfect teeth. She's a stunning genetic specimen who still looks great after being dragged around an island, and it makes perfect sense that Kong wants her for more than a light snack. It's a shame Jackson didn't give her more to work with than a tattered dress and a CGI co-star.

King Kong has all the visual gravity in the world, enough to make it worth seeing at least once. Jackson's trademark close-ups and gorgeous vistas evoke a real sense of mystery and wonder. The creepy parts are creepy, and the exciting parts are exciting. It's easy to see why students of film were enthralled by Jackon's endless inventiveness and organic touch with special effects.

Unfortunately, the movie still lacks even one human being you hope will survive or find happiness after the credits roll, and it's little surprise that most people walked out unmoved. Given that this seems to have been a conscious choice, it is a curious half-failure joined to half of a smashing success. Jackson brought unexpected humanity to square, poetry-spouting elves and trolls in Lord of the Rings; that he is unable to do the same with everyday people in King Kong lays an frustratingly empty foundation beneath an otherwise towering movie.

Unforgiven (1992)

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 03:24:07 GMT

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Richard Harris

I'm no expert on Westerns, but I'm pretty sure most characters in such movies are sharply divided between good and evil. The heroes might be hampered by insecurity, and they've made mistakes, but deep down, they are Good People. The bad guys are even more stock, simply existing to steal money and terrorize frontier towns. They are Evil, and we don't miss them when they die.

There are no purely good or evil people in Unforgiven. Horrendous people do good deeds, and decent people are driven by desperation to commit horrible acts. The movie's hero used to make a living blowing up women and children; the town sherriff glories in torture; the nicest woman in the movie turns tricks for a living.

In short, these characters are like real people, which is the kind of effect most movies shoot for and fail at, instead presenting us with a glamourized, black and white Hollyworld. Sometimes that's fine, because we go to movies for escapism. But a movie like Unforgiven is refreshing because it shows the director hasn't lost touch with what the world is really like. It doesn't matter that he puts his human beings in a Western, or a sci-fi movie, or a comedy, because the people still ring true.

Eastwood is the star of his own movie, playing William Munny, an assassin-turned-pig-farmer in 1880's Wyoming. Civilized by his now-dead wife, he has done his best to create an honest life with his two children. He's unfulfilled, though, and when he hears of two cowboys with a $1000 bounty on their heads, it doesn't take him long to ride off in pursuit of one last score. He brings along his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman), also a reformed killer, albeit more sure of his skills than his willingness to use them.

The cowboys are holed up in Big Whiskey, Wyoming, which is ruled by Sheriff "Little" Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Daggett, who clearly used to share a union card with Munny and Logan, now has some legitimacy, and he wants to keep Big Whisky safe from the ne'er-do-wells showing up to collect on the bounty.

Eastwood wants us to like the sheriff at first, and Hackman is an easy actor to sympathize with. However, when the first bounty hunter, English Bob (Richard Harris), comes to town, Hackman beats him half to death in the town square. The first few punches and kicks are a message to anyone else who plans to bring crime to Big Whiskey; the last few punches and kicks fly because Daggett enjoys them. It's intentionally confusing; should we root for the bloodthirsty sheriff, aiming to protect his town, or for his bloodied victim, who came to Big Whiskey to murder two people?

If the morality of the movie is vague, Eastwood's directing style is stark and direct, with few arresting camera angles and even fewer punches pulled. He wrote the movie's haunting score, but he does not use it to alert us to pivotal moments. The first time Munny kills a man, it is so mechanical as to be mundane, but we feel it all the more because it is so arrestingly real. The characters and their complexities are front and center, and as a result, we experience every movement and shot and death. The movie's climax, a shootout in a saloon, is so perfectly foreshadowed and executed that it feels like the scene Western directors have been trying and failing for years to create.

One of the biggest thrills of the movie is watching the four acting heavyweights at work. Eastwood stumbles a bit playing an uneducated gunslinger, and his backwoods language never comes off as completely believable. However, he brings a lot of emotional gravity to the part, and his final scene, screaming through a nighttime storm, is chilling. Hackman, as always, brings a believable combination of sadism and sly humor to the sheriff, and Freeman is his usual wise old self, although with a criminal edge. Richard Harris gives the best performance of all as English Bob, an eloquent Brit who is clearly "civilized" but kills simply because he is good at it.

All four actors demonstrate that audiences don't identify with heroes as much as they do with human beings. If we get to know someone, even to the heart of his most loathesome traits, we root for him to succeed because we understand his motives. Those motives are inside of us, too, however small, and we appreciate moviemakers who recognize that about us and admit it about themselves.

Flags of our Fathers (2006)

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:01:55 GMT

Directed by Clint Eastwood
Starring Ryan Phillipe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach

I sat down to Flags of our Fathers reasonably certain I wouldn't like it. I tend not to enjoy movies based on books I've read, because the plot twists are familar to me before they happen, and the characters never seem as fully-formed as they were in my head. Plus, Flags of our Fathers stars Ryan Phillipe. While he wasn't the worst aspect of Cruel Intentions, it must be said that there were no good aspects of Cruel Intentions.

This movie was especially vulnerable, because James Bradley's book made a real impression on me a few years ago. An adequate descrption of the battle of Iwo Jima, the book really shines when it uncovers the lives of the six men, one of them Bradley's father, who raised the flag five days into that battle.

If the famous photo of that flag-raising created its own mythology, then Bradley's book and Clint Eastwood's movie shatter it: three of the flag-raisers died on the island, and the other three -- the focus of the movie -- were paraded around America for shallow patriotic shows that raised money for an increasingly unpopular war. Of the three survivors, only Bradley's father can be said to have led a thoroughly successful life.

It's to Eastwood's credit that I walked out not only moved, but feeling more knowledgeable about the lives of these three young men. If I knew the basic plot of their lives, Eastwood and his cast filled in the colors and sounds and textures that made their experiences real. This is exactly how I imagined these men would look and act. Either there are a lot of disappointed moviegoers whose imaginations weren't catered to, or Eastwood is an especially sensitive interpreter of source material.

Much of this is due to career-making performances from all three leads. Surrounded by solid character acting from John Slattery and Barry Pepper (as doomed flag-raiser and "Marine's Marine" Mike Strank), the three stars ground a movie that spans five decades and thousands of miles.

Philippe, as stoic Navy Corpsman "Doc" Bradley, lives up to the potential that he's always hinted at. He doesn't get a lot of flashy speeches, but his calm, nuanced performance brings gravity to every scene he's in. Adam Beach, as Pima Indian Ira Hayes, runs the gamut from terrified to terrifying to teary-eyed, and there's power in each facet he wrings out of Hayes' tragic persona. Jesse Bradford has the most fun as accidental hero Rene Gagnon, who is continually disappointed by the fleeting rewards of fame. In a cast of thousands of grunts, Eastwood rewards us by continually returning to his three most compelling personalities.

The movie starts off mawkish and slightly false, but Eastwood soon finds his footing, and I'm hard-pressed to find any scene in the last three-quarters of the film that doesn't ring true in some way. The action scenes are graphically bloody in that chaotic Saving Private Ryan manner (Steven Spielberg co-produced), and the scenes in the States capture the glitz and glamour that overwhelm even these most jaded of war veterans.

Everything and everybody is treated with respect. In particular, Hayes' descent into alcoholism could have fallen into a dozen cliches, but instead it wrenches the viewer because Eastwood and Beach make it so convincing. The movie's score, composed by the director, is spare and beautifully complements the quieter scenes.

Riding high, Eastwood even succeeds with one of a filmmaker's most tired tricks, the endless "what became of the characters?" coda. (Even the marvelous Return of the King succumbed to this.) Framed by scenes of the younger Bradley interviewing veterans about his father, we see how either war or fame unmercifully swallowed up five of the six young men. It's heartbreaking, and never simply tacked-on. The final scene, taking place on a beach and lighthearted on the surface, is impossibly moving because of what has preceded it.

Eastwood is riding a wave of critical adulation, and in that context, a crowd-pleasing World War II movie was a risky move against his better instincts. But by giving the people their photograph and also illuminating the men crushed underneath it, Eastwood brings lasting depth to a movie that might have ridden to success on empty flag-waving alone.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:30:17 GMT

Directed by Larry Charles
Starring Sascha Baron Cohen

I don't have much insight to add to your perception of the pop culture event of the year. If you've seen Da Ali G Show, trust movie critics, or easily fall for hype, you will have already seen and loved this movie. If none of that sways you -- and it should, it really should -- you probably don't care that Borat exists, and you likely don't read my site anyway. But here goes.

Borat is really funny. You will laugh, you will cry, and if you're like me, you will sway in your seat, slap your knees, and then compose yourself and hope nobody noticed (they did, but they don't care about you enough to judge you). If it's not the funniest movie of all time, it's the funniest movie I've seen in years. The best compliment I can give it is that it sustains the subversive hilarity of a ten-minute TV sketch over the course of a two-hour movie. I once read an interesting quote that movies, for all their pomp, have a hard time capturing the concentrated hilarity of a great sitcom. Whether or not that's true, Borat captures that hilarity and then leaves it way behind.

Jewish comedian Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, a clueless Kazakh TV journalist who travels to America to learn valuable cultural lessons for his country. It's a thin setup that allows Cohen to joke about anything, mostly riffing on his character's ingrained but harmless prejudices. As he interviews unwitting Americans, he induces them to leave some of their own prejudices on the screen, and we all laugh at how evil we are deep down.

Critics are calling Borat a revolution in comedy, characterizing it as political and social commentary that exposes the worst about our country. I don't believe that when Margaret Cho says it about her own act, and I'm reluctant to accept it about Cohen's. Most of the movie's best moments are pure brilliant slapstick, such as a bear scaring the daylights out of children or two hairy men wrestling naked in the middle of a convention. To clarify, that's a huge compliment coming from me.

Borat himself isn't the most revolutionary character. As other critics have pointed out, he's one in a line of clueless foreign stereotypes, from The Wild and Crazy Guys to cousin Balki. The difference is that Cohen throws everything into making Borat real, and that he and director Charles (a Seinfeld vet) find a comic edge in the most cliched fish-out-of-water setups.

I'll venture that Cohen should retire Borat after this movie, because while he is brilliant at wringing every ounce of comedy out of his shtick, it is, after all, just a schtick. The eighth or ninth time Borat bashes Jews, people will begin to look elsewhere for their shock humor, and if Cohen is smart, he'll make sure they simply turn to another one of his characters.

This is perhaps more analysis than Borat deserves. Comics should study the movie and Cohen's performance, because he's light-years ahead of all but the best of them. Audiences should simply enjoy the hell out of it, perhaps several times, because it's nearly as funny as a movie can be.

War of the Worlds (2005)

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:02:37 GMT

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Tim Robbins

Awesome. See it. That's a cheap sentiment, but it's all I could think as I sat on the edge of my bed, staring at events playing out on my little computer screen: "I have to tell everybody about this movie." A hundred-million-dollar Tom Cruise flick has become my little secret, and I'm sharing it with you.

War of the Worlds is a movie that's easy to rip apart, and plenty of critics already have. The premise of aliens invading for no discernible reason is shaky, whether or not Spielberg is beholden to a century-old novel. Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, and as much as I feel his presence is the movie's emotional core, people are going to hate him for various reasons.

Very little is explained about the hows and whys of the movie's events, and Spielberg does leave a lot of questions unanswered by the abrupt ending. The plot is paper-thin, even though Cruise, Dakota Fanning, and Tim Robbins gamely give us humans to latch onto through the frantic orgy of destruction. Finally, the ending is a cop-out, which is becoming a frustrating theme with Spielberg.

But still, whatever, anyway, wow. I couldn't take my eyes off this movie. I'm no student of filmmaking, so I will just say that Spielberg does everything he has to with his actors, cameras, sets, and special effects so that we feel exactly what it would be like if gigantic alien tripods started destroying the neighborhood. If I was removed from the events, it was only by a very thin computer screen.

Even though it will (probably) never happen, I was convinced that this is what it would look like, this is what it would sound like, this is how survivors would act if the world has indeed ended and they've just found a temporary hiding place. Spielberg throws the hyper-realistic physical drama of Saving Private Ryan into the most unrealistic situation imaginable, and it works.

It's a thrill watching the aliens attack. For all the ungainliness of the tripods, Spielberg shows us surgically precise destruction, not just random explosions and running. There are frantic crowds, to be sure, but Spielberg never takes his lens off Cruise, and we become him, running and ducking and hiding, just a step ahead of death. When the aliens are off-screen, we see tension in the humans, and we know they will not be safe for long.

The characters aren't especially complex, but they're real enough that we recognize them as our friends and neighbors. We grasp that millions are dying, we see it happen in living color, and we still hope it doesn't happen to the people we care about. When the human beings are as graphic as the violence, we don't want anything bad to happen to them, even as the world dies. Spielberg expertly balances this large- and small-scale tragedy.

So, yes, the criticisms are true, the ones here and dozens more you can read about elsewhere. For what it's worth, War of the Worlds kept me riveted and at least superficially emotionally invested from beginning to end. It's a genre picture that neglects too many elements of great filmmaking, but it does what it does brilliantly.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 02:35:13 GMT

Directed by Mike Newell

My least favorite Harry Potter book turns out to be my favorite Harry Potter movie. The novel was convoluted, and while the movie can't completely escape that, director Mike Newell plays up the emotional content that's made all of the books so enduring. If I have a complaint, it's that Harry's hilariously creepy relatives the Dursleys are left out, but I'll cross my fingers for next time.

To be fair, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (the novel) is simply a lower shade of brilliant than the others, but I had issues with it. It's centered around the Triwizard Tournament, a barbaric event that is a complete 180 from the loveable running themes that marked Harry's first three years at Hogwarts. It's the first exploration of Lord Voldemoort's inner circle, which takes J.K. Rowling away from the themes of love and happy magic that are her bread and butter. And Lord Voldemoort's plot to ensnare Harry is so convoluted -- yet necessary for there to be a book at all -- as to make Dr. Evil blush at its impracticality.

Maybe sensing this, Newell focuses on the human aspects of the novel: teenagers preparing for a dance, a row between friends, Hagrid's delight at actually finding a girlfriend. The characters are more fleshed-out than they have been in previous installments. In addition, the visuals are suitably thrilling, from a fight with a dragon to a creepy underwater rescue. Everything is big and clear -- the settings and the personalities -- and Harry's universe comes colorfully alive.

My favorite viewing experience will always be the first movie. I hadn't read any Potter books at the time, and Christopher Columbus's by-the-book adaptation was my introduction to Rowling's amazing world. His second movie was almost as good, with some diminishing returns, while Alfonso Cuaron's flashy, admirably concise Prisoner of Azkaban suffered slightly for being too thin. Goblet of Fire is the most durable of the four; it's to Newell's credit that he turns a really good book into a really, really good movie.

Munich (2005)

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 21:03:41 GMT

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Starring Eric Bana, Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush

Steven Spielberg's Munich could have been a standard flag-waving action picture, and nobody would have blamed him for it. Saving Private Ryan vigorously waved a flag as it took action pictures to realistic new heights. There were no ambiguities in Schindler's List, nor should there have been. There's no shame in rallying behind a cause that everybody believes in, if you rally with intelligence and taste, and Spielberg excels at the crowd-pleaser-as-art.

With Munich, though, he takes on the less popular approach of attacking a complex moral problem from every possible angle and still making a compelling picture that everybody will want to see. Aided by screenwriters Tony Kushner and Eric Roth, he excels on the first front but falters a bit with the second.

The movie begins and ends with images of the 1972 Munich massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes were slaughtered by Palestinian terrorists. Spielberg dramatizes the historically muddy story of five Israeli agents assigned, off the books, to track down and kill the men who plotted the crime.

Targeted assassinations of terrorists might seem cut and dry, but when you are the second most scrutinized nation on Earth -- much of that coming from within -- it is, to say the least, not easy. All five men, especially the leader Avner (Bana), are totured by their actions. They are, after all, not soldiers, but (as far as the world is concerned) civilians murdering other civilians in the hopes that doing so will make Israel a safer place.

The movie pulls no moral punches, delving into the pointless, bloody muddle of back-and-forth assassinations that made no sense in 1972 and is still going on today. Both the Israeli and Palestinian causes get face time, with neither explicitly supported nor condemned. Characters argue passionately for the morality of their cause, and none of them win. This is a bold statement, making no statement at all when the world expects one.

Spielberg takes a further chance in going almost exclusively with character actors instead of famous names. They nail their scenes, especially Geoffrey Rush as secretive Mossad agent Ephraim, but the movie suffers for the lack of genuine star presence. Most of the actors deliver note-perfect performances, but none of them get significant screen time, and they are more concerned with sounding clever than seeming human. Consequently, if one of them dies -- and plenty do -- they leave behind very little to miss.

Bana is the closest thing in the movie to a star, and he is not given much to do but brood. He gives a terrific physical performance, but Spielberg robbed him of a chance to make his character more human. Only at the end do we get deeper into his psyche, and thus only then do we really empathize with his predicament. Good or evil, audiences need to identify with, or at least understand, characters in a movie, and Munich welches on that pact with its viewers.

The action scenes are also hit and miss. When dealing with a documented historical event, as in Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg is masterful. We eventually see the entire Munich massacre, close-up and graphic, and it is horrifying and painful to watch if you have any emotional investment in the event.

He shatters an Israeli myth as well, following Israeli special forces in their famous mission to Beirut. The mission is mostly known for future Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak dressing as a woman (with grenades in his purse) so he and his fellow commandos would seem like innocuous couples strolling down a Lebanese street.

Spielberg plays the scene for a few laughs, then shows the seamy underside of the mission: bloody assassinations, civilians and loved ones caught in the crossfire, rushed life-and-death decisions because there are no clean alternatives in such situations.

This is a strength of Munich, as well as one of its messages: that everything in life is close up and dirty for the people who carry it out, and political intrigue means nothing to the men sacrificing their souls in the drama. It is a weakness of the movie that we never really know the men involved, but we see them suffer, and only the most callous of us can't imagine what they are going through.

Elsewhere, the action scenes falter. They're excessively dark, and often the audience can't see what is happening. This is a problem I've had with movies since Armageddon: audiences will not be engaged if they don't know what is happening on the screen. Often, there are so many players in Munich that it is hard to tell what is going on, even when the scene is well-lit.

The movie ends powerfully, if not happily, and the sheer emotion and brilliant choreography of the penultimate scene nearly make up for the film's flaws. This is a film that stays with you for a long time, because it plays like a graphic news account combined with a thought-provoking philosophical text. However, for a story that purports to show the spiritual cost of combating terrorism, Munich effectively engages our brains while leaving our spirits and emotions largely unscathed.

Todd Rungren, Something/Anything

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 02:11:09 GMT

I love Todd Rundgren's double-album opus Something/Anything, but that's not as simple a proclamation as it sounds. Thirty years of critical opinion, hype and anti-hype, have affected my logical approach to the record. It can't, however, blunt my emotional reaction to the music.

When the album came out in 1972, it catapulted Rundgren from a cult figure to a superstar, however briefly. Critics hailed it as an amazing technical and musical accomplishment. Two of the songs hit the Top Twenty, and the album went gold. It's probably still the only Rundgren album the lay music fan has ever heard of, although given the man's weirdness and inconsistency, that obscurity might be deserved.

That was the hype. The anti-hype has crept up over the years, sometimes from a sincere lack of visceral reaction to Rundgren's music, often simply from a desire to buck critical opinion. Most everyone praises the hits, but it's become popular now to decry the abundance of filler on the record, or even to dismiss it all as soft rock. If the critic is a Rundgren fan, it's more fashionable now to praise the inscrutable, intermittently brilliant A Wizard, A True Star as the man's "true" masterpiece.

That album is good, but I'm going to stake a claim for Something/Anything as Todd's masterpiece and one of the better albums created by anybody in the rock era. It is a wild ride of big pop hooks, gorgeous melodies and textures, and just enough weirdness to keep things interesting. It is a grab-bag of musical ideas from a man who, in the early seventies at least, was overflowing with them.

At the very least, the album is an amazing technical achievement, as on the first three sides, Todd plays every instrument and sings every harmony (the fourth side is a free-for-all with his friends). Paul McCartney did this on his solo debut, but his sound, while often charming, was mostly chintzy and clearly homemade. Stevie Wonder made a career of this, and while he made it sound organic (and was a much more forceful drummer than Rundgren), he rarely ventured beyond his signature sound and successful ballad-or-funk aesthetic.

Rundgren, on the other hand, makes his solo music sound fully organic; on several tracks, he appears to be jamming with himself, and the last thing you'd guess is that he was layering the tracks one by one. If his performance on bass and drums isn't particularly muscular, it's nuanced enough that an unknowing critic might praise the "band" for its level of sensitive interplay. On guitar and keyboards, he is endlessly creative and remarkably precise. On other albums, Rundgren's guitar "heroics" are needlessly showoffy and lacking purpose, but his playing on tracks like "Black Maria" is thoughtful, powerful, and close to epic.

The diversity is also impressive: instead of just playing 4/4 rock songs or lilting ballads, he stretches himself with plodding hard rock, twisting latin rhythms, wacked-out synth instrumentals, a big band epic, glam rock, power pop, and even a Viking anthem.

Best of all, he graces the genre experiments with real melodies. On his debut album, Runt, Rundgren made a case for himself as one of pop music's greatest composers, writing melodies as endearing and colorful as those of Brian Wilson or Paul McCartney. The caveat is that he is almost criminally inconsistent, and worse, his filler tracks range from bland to downright irritating. Less-than-obsessive fans can easily be forgiven for not wanting to wade through the dreck to find the few timeless gems.

On Something/Anything, the filler is never worse than innocuous, and often at least superficially pretty. Rundgren smartly sequences the album so two dull tracks are never in a row, and there is always something great just around the corner.

And the best songs are indeed great. "I Saw The Light" gets all of the attention, with a swinging arrangement, sweet melody, and perfectly-timed slide guitar licks, but it's one of many gorgeous songs on Something/Anything. "Hello It's Me" was the record's other hit, and it shimmers and aches, maybe Rundgren's best attempt at a true romantic standard.

Classic melodies abound: the gentle "Cold Morning Light", the poppy "It Takes Two To Tango", the twisting, quirky, and still accessible "Song Of The Viking" on the first record; the weepy "One More Day (No Word)" and sublimely chorded "Torch Song" on the second. "Couldn't I Just Tell You" drives atop shiny acoustic chords; it's one of the first power-pop anthems, and a great one.

Rundgren's cohort Mark Klingman wrote the brassy, propulsive "Dust In The Wind", and Rundgren wrings every ounce of emotion out of it that he can. "Slut" is lyrically obnoxious, and Rundgren's rock voice is never as effective as his frothy, layered harmonies, but it's as fun and catchy as a great Mott The Hoople glam rocker. Best of all is the circular, inspirational, wrenchingly melodic "Saving Grace", which is the best sleeper pop song I've ever come across.

There are tracks that are less than brilliant, but they never overstay their welcome, and there's usually something interesting going on: "Little Red Lights" channels Hendrix on guitar, and "Overture" is a random, lo-fi clip of two of Rundgren's sixties bands shredding through their favorite oldies.

The sound is miles from soft rock, even on the ballads, and this should be clear to anyone who suffered through the computer-sequenced eighties. The guitars and piano notes are big and glossy, but just DIY enough to avoid sounding sterile. Meanwihle, Rundgren's skittering drumbeats keep even the ballads from seeming glacial.

It's rare that I listen to an album once and know it will be one of my favorites when I am thirty and forty and fifty years old. Something/Anything fulfills that lofty criteria. It is an exhilirating ride, with Rundgren's humor and lovely, idiosyncratic voice giving personality to everything, and timeless melodies backing it all up. You might honestly hear it as an overblown, filler-packed ego trip; wouldn't it be great, though, if you took a chance and heard the Something/Anything I hear?

In Defense of Outkast's Idlewild

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 03:40:19 GMT

Coming after 2003’s Speakerboxx/The Love Below, Outkast’s Idlewild debuted this week to deserved hype and the almost inevitable letdown that comes with that hype. Most reviews I’ve read have been lukewarm at best. Common charges are that it shows off the further fracturing of a once-great team; that there are no singles with across-the-board appeal like “Bombs Over Baghdad”, “Ms. Jackson”, or “Hey Ya”; that it’s aimless and overlong; and that it’s miles from standard hip-hop, and not in the right direction.

There is truth to all of these assertions. Andrew 3000 and Big Boi only appear together on a few of Idlewild’s 25 tracks, continuing the split theme of Speakerboxx/The Love Below. It’s like the Beatles making The White Album for a second time instead of reconciling for Abbey Road.

It is frustrating that most tracks on Idlewild are basically solo songs, made even more audible by the clear split in Dre’s and Big Boi’s styles. Dre’s tracks are crazy and experimental; Big Boi’s are slick, bringing class to mainstream hip-hop, and the twains rarely meet. The styles are linked by the sound of thirties ragtime, to go along with the album's accompanying movie, but as with most concept albums, the concept rarely stays consistent.

What makes this bearable, though, is that Dre and Big Boi so damn good at what they do. I wish Big Boi would add a muscular rap to some of Dre’s flights of fancy, but they’re still fascinating on their own; I wish Dre would scramble some of Big Boi’s straightforward grooves, but they’re plenty catchy as they stand.

The critics are right that Idlewild is lacking a single that’s going to be all over the radio. There is no ubiquitous summer song on Idlewild, but there is plenty of strong music. “Mighty O” is their shot at radio play, and it does fall short, thanks to a stilted beat, but Dre’s chorus vocals and Big Boi’s wordplay are still fantastic.

On “Idlewild Blue”, Dre starts with a simple acoustic guitar riff and layers it into a mini-hip-pop symphony; it’s clearly not a single, but it’s just as musically powerful. (It’s also self-written, self-produced, and mostly self-played, impressive in a genre that usually considers melodic creativity to be somebody else’s problem.) Dre also produced the euphoric “Morris Brown”, which makes a marching band funky; it’s too heavy and strange for radio, but a classic nonetheless.

Big Boi usually relies on outside producers, but he clearly has a hand in how things turn out. He tends to overuse “The Way You Move”s trick of airy, harmonized choruses, which, while pretty, rarely wrap themselves around a truly memorable hook. However, the varied production on these tracks, coupled with Big Boi’s newly authoritative and focused rapping, make them musically deeper than “The Way You Move”, if not as catchy. It’s an easy cop-out to say that an album is too willfully obscure for the radio, but in the case of Idlewild, it’s true; the tracks are powerful but just on the wrong side of the mainstream.

At 25 tracks, Idlewild is long, maybe even too long. I won’t argue that every track is essential, but I will say that they all are worthwhile. The juke-joint swing of “Call The Law” has little to do with hip-hop or even Outkast, but it’s catchy and well-produced. You can level the same criticism at “Mutron Angel” and “Greatest Show On Earth”, and while there is less to defend about them, they’re still powerful in their own way.

Critics have pointed to Dre’s willfully amateur “Makes No Sense At All” as the most egregious violator; to me, it’s offbeat and even fascinating. The easiest target is Dre’s eight-minute closer “A Bad Note”. It’s a self-indulgent, mournful heavy guitar groove, like a lesser “Maggot Brain”. To rap fans, this is anathema; at the same time, George Clinton produced a handful of lesser “Maggot Brains” and was critically rewarded for the audacity of showcasing guitars on a “black” record.

An easy comparison to Idlewild for critics, given Dre’s avant-garde sex-god schtick, is Prince’s sprawling and mostly forgotten 90’s output. I disagree. I know more about Prince’s 90’s output than anybody should, and there is no comparison here. Those albums are interminable; and there are plenty of rock and rap albums that, even including several sure-fire singles, are impossible to sit through from end to end.

Idlewild, for all of its self-indulgence and length, never stops being listenable and enjoyable. The tracks are relatively short, and the requisite skits are funny and full of energy. Most importantly, after so many years in the game, the group can keep your interest sonically even when a given song is slightly weak. The beats are sharp, and there are little musical tricks everywhere; it’s miles from Lil Jon and anything else I hear on the radio.

Finally, even through Idlewild showcases Big Boi rhyming at the top of his game and brings a hip-hop sensibility to a mix of jazz, R&B, and ragtime music, it’s not rap music the way people normally think of it. To fans of the group’s earlier work, this might legitimately be disappointing. However, I like where the group is headed, even if that means solo careers for two talents who can no longer be contained by a duo.

Dre has received most of the criticism for seemingly going off the deep end, but critics who only love him for the catchiness of “Hey Ya” are missing the point. If he’s not Stevie Wonder or Prince, he’s the best we have in this generation. We should give him time, allow him some misfires, and sit back as he pushes the boundaries of popular music. Already, he's hitting much more often than he misses.

So yes, Idlewild is fragmented, not radio friendly, overlong, and barely hip-hop. It’s also already one of my favorite albums. I predict that in several years, when dozens of more “authentic” hip-hop albums have been forgotten, people will still be enjoying and studying Idlewild as one of most musically creative albums to come out of any genre in this decade.

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:22:07 GMT

Sugar's Copper Blue isn't one of my favorite albums -- there are too many hard-rock cliches attached to dull melodies -- but I realized how much the best songs mean to me. They kept me company at work today and provided solidarity as I dealt mentally with breakups past.

It's hard to warm up to Bob Mould's sound; he amplifies his guitars so loudly that you almost miss the desparate wailing underneath. You might mistake the sound for generic hard rock, and his voice is so flat that he has to give the vocals everything he's got. David Barbe and Malcolm Travis provide muscular backing, but they're inessential to the album's emotional impact, which is all up to Mould. Even the melodies aren't striking the way a great Stevie Wonder or Paul McCartney tune would be; they twist and turn and eventually get to you through sheer repetition and forceful presentation.

"If I Can't Change Your Mind" plays the lightest and hits the hardest, a furiously strummed acoustic rocker in which Mould politely asks, but does not beg, his lover to stay. It's deceptively peppy, with layered jangle and self-harmonizing, and Mould's words are curiously rational for a song that expresses such heartbreak.

His lover feels he's been cheated on, and Mould won't cop to it, presumably because he's not guilty. He's sad beyond belief but stays off his knees because it would do him no good. "Somewhere in my mind, I know there's no tomorrow" -- but -- "if I can't change your mind, then no one will." He knows you can't stop someone from leaving. You can beg, but it won't change how the other person feels, and in the end, it's wasted effort.

Musically, it's the most compelling song on the album and the best candidate for a true rock classic. The dynamics are note-perfect, and Mould even throws in a subversively perky guitar solo that makes perfect sense musically and no sense emotionally. Still, no cheeriness can mask the lyrics or the trepidation in Mould's voice, which bring true gravity to a song that would otherwise be empty fun.

"The Act We Act" is the most characteristic Sugar song on the album, a big, lumbering rocker that eventually drills into your head through an insidiously catchy chorus. The song's message is less clear -- at least to me -- so I focus on the melody and Mould's typically heartbroken delivery.

His lover is leaving again, and while he understands this time, he's no more comforted in the face of such a loss. He draws out the structure and makes you beg for the chorus, which always satisfies when it comes around. He conveys annoyed, hurt frustration without the requisite yelling or immaturity that too many bands would bring to the same theme.

"Hoover Dam" has the album's most impressionistic lyrics; Mould travels from Las Vegas to the Mississippi River to Hell (I always figured you skipped the Mississippi River part), and he seems exhilirated by the whole process and excited by the unknown possibilities. He wastes one of his sweetest melodies on such a bizarre song, which is aided to its crescendo by some incongruous but effective shrieking keyboards.

It all builds up to a desparate scream that, buried by guitars and Mould's own nasality, should have no impact but instead sounds final and pained and irrevocably sad. It's a wild dive into the water, which eventually covers us up with swirling guitars and synth parts and Mould's own trailed-off wails.

Finally, he ends the album with the hard-rock lullabye "Man On The Moon". It's lyrically guileless -- "if you wish, all your dreams will come true after all" -- and musically pounding, the direct opposite of "If I Can't Change Your Mind." For the first and last time, Mould is happy; it's a sneaky way to end the album, but not unappreciated, and the melody is appropriately tender.

It's powerfully optimistic in the same way that the other songs convinced you that things would never get better. It comforts me and makes me want to cry because the moon is bigger, more innocent, and more enduring than anything earthly that might try to hurt me.

These four songs fall into the shrinking category of songs that make me feel, as opposed to simply being ear candy. I get Mould's heartbreak, and musically, he proves that he gets mine. All the hard rock bluster is an unexpected source of emotion, but that same bluster can really drive the feelings home when the song is strong enough.

(Thanks to Chris Willie Williams for turning me on to Copper Blue several years ago! And for being the only person who actually finished this review.)

Dancing

Sun, 28 May 2006 00:31:16 GMT

The Kinks, "Come Dancing"
Generation X, "Dancing With Myself"

Two distinctly different songs, both among my favorites. One is a guileless ditty about dancing to big band music, and the other is about jerking yourself off. That's fine. There are endless varieties of great music.

"Come Dancing" hit long after the Kinks' heyday, but it was still quite popular. It's intentionally lightweight, with a quick electric guitar break so Dave Davies will have something to do. The hook is a sprightly, uplifting steel drum riff, which is cheekily doubled by big band horns at the end.

Ray Davies' nostalgic tale of his sister and changing times is full of emotion, simply because you can tell how important it was to him, and he includes enough details to make it meaningful to us, too. It's sad because the good times are over, but because he's recalling something fun, the happy riff never sounds forced. "Come Dancing" effectively and honestly plays both sides of the emotional spectrum.

"Dancing With Myself", Billy Idol's first snarl at stardom, is every bit as good. The beat is unrelenting pop-rock, and the backing vocals are right where they should be; the only punkish element is Idol's stuttering, menacing vocal.

He sings of -- I don't know, actually, although I'm pretty sure everybody but his hand has been rejecting him lately, hence "dancing with myself". Combined with a jangly guitar and burbling bass, it's four minutes of infectious, unstoppable fun, with just enough danger to ensure classic rock airplay for decades to come.

I don't dance, although I'd like to start in New York, preferrably with other people. I reviewed these songs together because they're distant lyrical cousins, but I'd recommend them to anybody who enjoys propulsive pop with a hidden but distinctive emotional edge.

The Flaming Lips: "Fight Test"

Tue, 02 May 2006 17:14:13 GMT

I always go back to the first time I heard, and heard, and heard, and heard this song. I was on a plane to New York City last December, and I found it on the plane's MP3 library. I heard it once and was entranced; and I must have listened to it a dozen or more times before the plane landed.

What makes it so addictive? Wayne Coyne's dreamy melody is inexplicably sad for all its hopefulness; his piercing tenor aches with wonder; and the swirling, layered production turns the song into a slowly expanding fever dream. The lyrics are suitably mystical and at least superficially profound: "I don't know where the subbeams end, and the starlights begin / It's all a mystery". It's a song I can listen to over and over, and I did, on the flight back, and then I bought it in Miami a few days later.

Mostly, I associate the song with walking through La Guardia Airport, adjusting to a city that (absolutely, completely) wasn't Gainesville and to an experience that wasn't my usual rut. On the first day I knew the song, I sang it softly to myself as my ears unclogged and I waited for my baggage to come down the ramp. I was sad in a happy way, tired but excited, alone and independent but about to be surrounded by my best friends. There is something entrancing about experiencing the new and different, and "Fight Test" completed the experience.

The Music Man (1962)

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 22:39:53 GMT

Written and composed by Meredith Wilson (screenplay by Marion Hargrove)
Directed by Morton DaCosta
Starring Robert Preston and Shirley Jones

How to review this movie without ~~seeming gay~~ gushing? It's relatively easy to criticize technical points on a movie I'm not crazy about. It's much harder to convey the greatness of something I have loved since childhood.

I do not want to give the impression that I like musicals, or condone them, or feel that planet Earth is big enough for musicals and myself. People do not just break into song. Well, maybe people who work happier jobs than I do. Nobody in The Music Man ever seems to work. Maybe that is why they sing so much. I probably would, too.

So why am I enchanted by Meredith Wilson's tale of a travelling conman who is seduced by the stubborn citizens of a turn-of-the-century Iowa town? Underneath the standard musical trappings -- hammy performances, inane dancing, dialogue that is just killing time until the next song -- there is real wit in the dialogue, and there is joy in the execution. The words aren't spoken down to us. We are in on the joke. Further, at least three characters grow believably as the story progresses. They are not just excuses for someone to play diva.

Robert Preston, who originated the role on Broadway, is note-perfect as conman "Professor" Harold Hill. As he says in the movie, singing is just sustained talking, and his deep baritone sustains the character throughout the movie. It's a winking performance; normally I can't stand irony, but musicals are usually so far off in crazy-land that I appreciate the anchor he drops in my reality.

Shirley Jones is convincing as his skeptical love interest, and the ensemble cast -- including a young Ron Howard -- develop one-note characters that the viewer doesn't get sick of.

What I really love, though, is the music. To my ears, much Broadway music is composed merely as a backdrop for clever dialogue. Wilson, on the other hand, wrote real songs for The Music Man, tunes that are still memorable today. Some are joyful and uplifting: the giddy "Wells Fargo Wagon", the energizing classic "Seventy Six Trombones". Some are unashamedly romantic: the soaring "Goodnight My Someone" and delicate "Till There Was You".

He even throws in a few charming barbershop quartet songs that do nothing to further the plot, and they don't bother me. When the songs are just excuses for words to fly, the words are funny and worth hearing, and the diction is crisp and quirky enough to keep our attention. I normally hate this stuff, and I love nearly every song in The Music Man.

It is a bit too long, and I could do without the dancing. But this is a joyful movie, full of colors and fun, based on the only musical (yet) I can sit through. It is guileless, fun, and as uncontrived as a musical can be without the characters spontaneously breaking into realistic dialogue. I can do realistic in my own life. It's no fun. So maybe I love the movie because the characters are so much happier than me, and not afraid to sing about it.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

Wed, 22 Mar 2006 12:37:30 GMT

Directed by George Armitage
Starring John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Dan Aykroyd

I tend to resent movies like this one. It's quirky and fun, with enough fast-paced action to satisfy my dwindling attention span, but it's pure Hollywood product, forgotten by everyone involved as soon as the press junket interviews were over. I don't think it's art. It's just kind of there. People with talent needed to make a movie because it's what they do, and people went to see it because it's what they do. Everybody is happy. Nobody is particularly fulfulled. Maybe I'm cynical, but so is Grosse Pointe Blank.

John Cusack, without stretching himself at all, plays Martin Blank, a loveable, neurotic hitman returning to his old town for the first time in ten years. To Cusack's credit, we sympathize with this professional killer because he doesn't seem to wish any harm on his victims. When he shoots, it's all business and nothing personal, which I imagine is how director George Armitage viewed this movie.

Cusack doesn't bring much depth to a role that wasn't written with any, but his persona is enjoyable. He's a Good Guy deep down, who cares about his mom and watches out for innocent bystanders. We're supposed to ignore the fact that he belongs in solitary confinement instead of cracking jokes and wooing his ex-girlfriend, and that he'd calmly slit our throats if the price was right.

Almost immediately, Martin runs into Debi Newberry, the girl he stood up for prom ten years earlier before disappearing for a decade. As Debbie, Minnie Driver gives a performance that's almost too understated; Debbie has little quirks, but she moves and talks so slowly that she's almost not there. That's okay. I still want to marry Minnie Driver.

There's some superficial drama involving a rival hitman who is trying to kill Martin for reasons I couldn't quite figure out. Played with a cool psychosis by Dan Aykroyd, his scenes are among the highlights of the movie. Joan Cusack is also fun as Martin's secretary, who arranges professional hits like she's planning board meetings.

Each individual scene is enjoyable, even the bloodbath at the end. I cared a little about Martin and Debi working out their issues, and about Martin learning to value life even as his on-screen body count rises into the double digits. But everybody seems like they're going through the motions, from script to directing to acting. Do they then have the right to expect an emotional committment from the viewer?