Rockcrit nerd-dom's biggest day: The Village Voice published its annual Pazz & Jop poll.
#1 album = Kanye West, Late Registration
#1 single = Kanye West f/t Jamie Foxx, "Gold Digger."
Here, for the last time, my ballot. You can view my comments here, here, and here.
Whatever smidgen of sympathy I had for Cindy Sheehan just evaporated , as she once again proves that the only people more deluded than right-wingers by autocratic anti-yanqui rhetoric are leftists. Revolting.
This old Christgau essay, touching on The Basement Tapes and Blood on the Tracks, acknowledges why Bob Dylan is one of those rare great artists I love beyond measure but whom I don't play very often:
Unlike many people I admire, I've never played my Dylan records repeatedly or even regularly. Their conceptual strictness has discouraged both easy listening--even Nashville Skyline, for all its calculated pleasantness, never fit smoothly into my days--and full personal identification. And so the listener in me subconsciously vetoes the critic; there are times when I crave a specific Dylan record with a fervor of the will no other artist can arouse in me, and I value him immensely for that, but only rarely can he just be part of a stack. Lacking the totally committed professionalism of meaningful/listenable masterpieces like Layla and Exile on Main Street, Blood on the Tracks fails to achieve what I suspect was intended for it--a place in the stack with just such records, all of which it melts or freezes just because it is so distinctively Dylan.Exactly. I can't remember the last time I played Bringing it All Back Home or Blonde on Blonde; even Blood on the Tracks, my favorite Dylan, gets played as often as Joy Division; "Buckets of Rain" wrings me much like "Decades" does, which means I don't play either of them often.
The Strokes, First Impressions of Earth
The first six songs are everything you'd expect: wry, vulgar, contradictory admissions of narcissism, enlivened by the ever-more-sophisticated guitar work (or what do I know, maybe they're just mixed flatteringly) of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, Jr. Right after Julian's "Street Hassle" homage/parody "Ask Me Anything," in which he confesses that he's got nothing to say, the album's got, well, nothing to say. Julian sold his megaphone for this?
Bryan Ferry, "Help Me" 
This obscurity from The Fly soundtrack features production and instrumental work from co-writer Nile Rodgers. Rather depressing – the most supple rhythm guitarist of all time, intimidated by the God of Love in a way that Bill Murray never was. If you like tremulous Boys & Girls-era Ferry, check this out.
Kelley Polar, Love Songs of the Hanging Gardens 
Indie art-dance, with classical pretensions and correct referents, what else is new. The squelchy synth-bass and meta-narratives are hummable, but Polar ain't Scritti Politti.
...according to TIME, so of course it's true. How fascinating to watch this Brokeback phenomenon; to read the horseshit claims issued in its behalf; to watch as this wonderful film is acclaimed for all the things it ain't.
This isn't stopping the film's marketers, who if there was a category for Best Public Relations Campaign extant would deserve a armful of them:
Focus had a marketing strategy that may be called a modified limited rollout. It released the film at a pace as measured as Lee's direction. The studio purposefully sent the movie first to urban cinemas, but not necessarily the gay neighborhoods, and relied on word of mouth. But it also spent big, more than the movie cost to make, on marketing, especially to women. It figured the men would go along if they "do not want to look like a complete troglodyte to [their] girlfriends," says Schamus.Thankfully the folks at ILE bring things down to their proper level -- which is to say, the gutter.
David Thomson ponders the hazards of being a midtwentysomething male actor in Hollywood these days. New it-boy Jake Gyllenhaal has to compete with Orlando Bloom, Jude Law, Hayden Christensen, James Franco, Joaquin Phoenix, and his Brokeback Mountain tent mate Heath Ledger in the same way that, say, Anne Sheridan, Joanne Dru, Linda Darnell, Gene Tierney, Jeanne Crain, and a half-dozen lesser lights of post-World War II Hollywood cinema fought to get noticed.
Following George Clooney's example is one way out, Thomson suggests. Or Viggo Mortenson's. Or, better, Tom Cruise:
In other words, these young men are under terrible pressure to make the right choices - which means, be in the right films. The recent history of Hollywood is littered with movies that introduced a whole team of very young talent. Remember Francis Coppola's The Outsiders, from 1983, with this cast list - C Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, and Tom Cruise. It's not quite that everyone else has faded away, but 23 years ago I don't think Cruise would have been the automatic favourite to survive. That he did win out has something to do with his screen presence and his grin, but rather more with his instincts as a businessman and a career-maker.There's something to the old studio system. Gary Cooper, Barbra Stanwyck, and Humphrey Bogart, to pick three random but telling examples, were not permitted to take "challenging" roles: they were cast in Gary Cooper and Barbra Stanwyck roles. This meant that, in Bogart's case, most of his 70+ movies were undistinguished, or worse. Which is no matter. Film, more than music or literature, requires only one or two great performances; and when you consider the aesthetic -- not to mention iconographic -- value of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and In a Lonely Place -- this is quite enough.
I'm going to be posting the occasional R&B blurb over at Back & Forth, Andy Kellman's excellent blog. The really good news: Michaelangelo Matos will post entries from his long-dormant Boogie Fever, in which he attemped to comment on every single R&B #1 from 1942 to the present day (yeah, yeah, but remember: Don Quixote did manage to knock down a few windmills too, so shut up). Check us out if you get a chance.
Boxofficemojo reports that Brokeback Mountain was the number-one movie in the country on Tuesday -- a rather stunning state of affairs considering that the film is (still!) only playing on 683 screens.
According to their website, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe, better known as the Pet Shop Boys, have remixed "Sorry," the second single from Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor. But this sounds too good to be true:
An unnamed source close to the PSB camp has said that Neil and Chris were actually somewhat apprehensive about handing their mix over to Maddie for her first listen because they had added what is essentially new music featuring Neil's singing; they apparently feared that she would think they were trying to share the spotlight or even upstage her on her own record. But, much to their relief, she loved it! In fact, it's been reported that Madonna feels that the PSB work on "Sorry" is the best remix ever done of one of her songs.The Boys' own album, Redundant -- er, Fundamental -- is slated for an April release.
Anyone seen Junebug? Amy Adams will most likely be nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Embeth Davitz's loquacious sister-in-law. Phil Morrison's direction alternated between the assured and the awkward, likehe wasn't sure whether to stress the Eudora Welty-Flannery O'Connor grotesqueries in the script or the character interplay at which he excelled for most of the picture. There are beautiful scenes between Adams and the improbably named Alessandro Nivoli as well as between Davitz and Scott Wilson which almost compensated for the Sling Blade-meets-Actors-Studio tomfoolery that ensued whenever Frank Hoyt Taylor's dullwitted artist was onscreen. Adams triumphs over every bad idea tossed in her direction, like being saddled with horrible please-laugh-I-beg-you lines like this one, in response to Davidz's admission that she counts horseback riding and reading as hobbies: "At the same time?"
Special mentions: Yo La Tengo's spare score.
Yesterday's big news concerned the two lawsuits filed by civil rights groups against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program. One of the plaintiffs? Our own friend Christopher Hitchens.
Here's his statement, posted on the ACLU's website:
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.The irascible contrarian pissed off a lot of leftists because he supports the war in Iraq. What drives his critics bonkers though is their inability to understand that his commitment to fighting Islamo-fascism stems from his opposition to any form of government encroachment on the rights of its citizens.
I've been listening to Madonna's Erotica a lot over the last few months, its strength becoming more apparent with each play. Now I rank it in her top three (Like a Prayer and the eponymous debut are the others). Here's my reappraisal.
While I doubt that Joseph Biden would willingly eliminate the only vehicle for his regular-guy boringness, he's got a point: why not debate the merits of a SCOTUS candidate on the Senate floor, like it used to be done? That way we can forget the sight of the majority party purring its questions to the candidate, and the minority party getting red in the face because it wants to force the SCOTUS candidate to admit to a bad faith that members of the minorty party themselves flaunt.
Above all, we can wipe the memory of a SCOTUS candidate's wife crying for the cameras.
What's the connection between Jack Abramoff and Brokeback Mountain? Corey Anderson at Minneapolis City Pages has the answer.
The National Society of Film Critics selected Capote and David Cronenberg (for Best Film and Best Director, respectively) as the best of the year. Philip Seymour Hoffmann beat Jeff Daniels and Heath Leger for Best Actor; Reese Witherspoon, to no one's surprise, won Best Actress.
Here's the complete list.
In these perilous times, we must snatch some comfort from consistency – like Jon Pareles', who can always be counted on to miss the point. Wiping tears from his eyes with a hanky he's hoping to drop in front of Bono, Pareles decries the venality of radio and the consumers who tune in and download:
Voting with its dollars, the public ignored the esoteric favorites championed by critics and went for music that offered a little comfort and dance beats. Entertainment, not ambition, was the priority.I can see the frissons of self-congratulation after he realized that "quiescent" not only sounded intelligent and anti-pop, but was several notes flat.
Entertainment is always part of the story. Getting heard widely and regularly is the essential part of becoming a pop phenomenon. Yet through the years, the most memorable blockbusters have aspired to something beyond popularity. They set out to inspire, to startle, to define an era or to defy it. For the likes of Nirvana, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Eminem, Alicia Keys, Metallica or Bruce Springsteen, catchiness has been a means rather than an end. By those standards, million-selling pop in 2005 was downright quiescent. That may be part of the reason that album sales dropped again in 2005: mass-market hits felt disposable, like a momentary pleasure rather than like something worth owning.
An exceptional year. I couldn't find room for Tropical Malady, The Constant Gardener, and Downfall, or for compelling misfires like Walk the Line, Broken Flowers, Munich, and Wedding Crashers.
10. Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson.
Aslan and the final battle are not all they can be; how fortunate that the harrowing prologue (not in the book), Tilda Swinton (as a very cold and White Witch), and Georgie Henley as Lucy Pevensie are.
9. 2046, directed by Wong Kar-Wai.
Gorgeous nonsense, with paint-box cinematography, four of the most beautiful actresses in the world, Tony Leung doing Bogie-as-Philip-Marlowe, and an android.
8.Good Night, Good Luck, directed by George Clooney
A film with none of modern liberalism's worst flaws (tendentiousness, sentimentality) and most of its strengths (cogency, authority). Frank Langella and Jeff Daniels (in his second great performance this year) are the standouts in an outstanding cast.
7. The 40 Year-Old Virgin
Among other things, it's the best endorsement for those large, corporate electronic superstores (Circuit City and Best Buy) ever filmed. I mean, where can you buy pals like Andy Stitzer's? (and can I buy Paul Rudd an Oscar nod already?).
6. The Squid & The Whale, directed by Noah Baumbach.
Literary pretention (in the form of Jeff Daniels' insufferable novelist-professor) has never been skewered so mercilessly. Probably the best film about the damage wrought by divorce since Alan Parker's Shoot The Moon. It also proves that Laura Linney Can Do No Wrong.
5. Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog.
The year's most absurd collision of sensibilities: Herzog's posh German nihilism and Timothy Treadwell's unctuous New Age softheadedness. In the horror that Herzog (wisely) leaves offscreen, we are left no less dumbfounded than Treadwell's colleagues and girlfriends, unable to answer the most basic question: If we could live eternally, would our family and friends come any closer to understanding us?
4. Mysterious Skin, directed by Gregg Araki.
What I wrote on November 3.
3. Capote, directed by Bennett Miller.
The Writer as Monster: a lisping, queeny, ruthless sonofabitch. He can make a fabulous martini with one hand, compose a short story of surpassing delicacy with the other. He'll also watch you hang from the gallows.
2. Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee.
God, I don't want to write another word about this film. It's this year's Mystic River: a perfectly respectable piece of mainstream filmmaking, its symbolism telegraphed in advance for the femme-y boys, Jake-besotted girls, and "middle Americans" to whom this film is marketed. But look: it's nothing its slobbering publicity said it was (the perv in me wanted more sex, dammit), but it is a few other things we didn't expect. Far from fetishizing repression, the film shows how its tendrils curl around us before smothering the people we love, the horror of which comes alive thanks to Lee's exemplary supporting cast (bouquets to Kate Mara, Anne Hathaway, Michelle Williams, and Roberta Maxwell). Then there are the leads. Heath Ledger's performance is for the ages. Jake Gyllenhaal -- awake and starlingly attractive, at last, after too many roles calling for anomic ardor -- registers the gradual decay of hope, in eyes as blue as the sky over his beloved mountain. My first thought -- an analogy to Max Ophuls' glorious Earrings of Madame De... -- no longer seems far-fetched. Like the earrings belonging to the titular heroine of the Ophuls film, Ledger's Ennis Del Mar holds his memories of transient happiness on Brokeback Mountain close to his chest, so in thrall to lust and love that he hardly registers their import; but Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist knows too well, and it brings only vastation. What an existence: thwarted in life and death. If ya can't fix it, you might as well forget to breathe.
1. A History of Violence, directed by David Cronenberg.
I still think this film tries to have it both ways: pulp and pulp that tries to transcend itself. Maybe that's why no one to whom I recommended this film liked it. Not one. But Cronenberg's direction works like a vise; the first 10 minutes were unsurpassed this year in the sureness with which they inspired pity and terror. Maria Bello and Viggo Mortensen, as the most adult couple Hollywood's seen in some time, transform marriage into a wager -- like the characters in Bruce Springsteen's "Tunnel of Love," they have too much at stake yet are willing to lose it. And William Hurt has to be seen to be believed.
