Archive for the 'reviews' Category

Before the Devil Knows your Dead

June 20, 2009

Rach and I got this film out the other night on the strength of the main leads: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke. We weren’t disappointed. Acting, cinematography and editing were great. And the plot was gripping. The story centres on two brothers who in need of cash decide to rob their own parents jewelry store. The heist goes wrong and their lives descend into an ever increasing pit of chaos.

The back of the DVD box had a quote from some critic saying: “One of those films to get inside your head and leave you talking for days”. In actual fact, this did not happen and this is why. The problem was we learned nothing about human nature. There was no redemption. No unresolved question. No glimmer of hope. All the principal characters were animal-like, they had no subtlety and they pursued their twisted goals ruthlessly and without any recourse to morality. In short, it looked like a world without God.

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brilliant music video. please watch.

July 30, 2008

OK, OK, so it`s REM again. But, even if it wasn’t I still think I’d be raving about this music video. It’s so good I forced my wife to watch it. This music video, like all good music videos, enhances my enjoyment of a track, and doesn’t – like so often – suck the magic out of the music. Why might I put this video in my top ten favourite music videos ever? Let me explain…

1. It’s very cleverly animated. REM have drafted in Canadian artists CRUSH to make this video. CRUSH did the last REM video (Hollow Man) but this time they surpassed themselves with a very smart visual presentation.

2. The video retains the tone of the song. REM’s song Man-Sized Wreath is a fun and chirpy number from their most recent album. The bouncy humour belies a stinging tirade against the facade of populist politics (re the lyric – “Nature abhors a vacuum but what’s that between your ears?”). The song is allegedly based on Michael Stipe’s indignation at the shallow pomp that surrounded George Bush’s visit to Martin Luther King Jr’s grave in 2002. The video retains both the cheeky swipe and rasping rhetoric in a series of surging images, occasionally violent, at times comical, but always fascinating.

3. The people who made the video paid careful attention the lyrics of the song. The video is a choreography of the song. It picks up on the idea of a motorcade of blacked-out no-face state cars (name-checked in the song) and adds a sprinkle of visual cues derived from the lyrics themselves – dance floors, fires, fists in the air and most amusingly of all the man-sized wreath itself, cheerfully thrown onto a fire by a pixelated Michael Stipe. These signals repeat and loop in rhythm with the song. It’s brilliant.

4. The band feature. It’s obviously not essential that a great video has to have the band themselves present, but it’s nice to have a nod in the direction of the creators of the song and their performance of it. So, here, REM get a look in – with a few cuts of Stipe singing but, as I mentioned above, the icing on the cake is the computer-game sprite versions of the band members bopping along to their own tune and winning points for throwing man-sized wreaths on fires.

5. The visuals mirror the album art. The sight of huge buildings and cities swelling and swimming around is a direct parallel to the album art of the record man-sized wreath is taken from: Accelerate. It demonstrates that this music video is part of a bigger art project for the entire promotion for the album and tour.

6. The video pulls in powerful and relevant imagery from elsewhere – namely, the Tianamen square protest and oil-fields burning.

7. The video has a beginning, middle and end. Often, the narratives of music videos are at odds with the songs they portray – forced stories on top of music and lyrics which do not support the parable or fable the videomakers portray. This video does have a small story – a story not inherent in the lyrics – but the clip finishes with a joyful, optimistic, “power to the people” moment which correlates very well with the up-beat nature of the song.

8. It’s breathtaking. Not counting any of the above, the video is, quite simply, a whole lot of fun.

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the painted veil

April 22, 2008

What begins as not a lot more than a BBC period drama is rescued by solid performances from Naomi Watts and Edward Norton and some beautiful location cinematography in China. Based on the book of the same name, the Painted Veil is a character piece about two people in an vacuous marriage who eventually fall in love in the midst of the painful surroundings of a cholera epidemic. Sound familiar? Well, it’s not a far cry historically or thematically from Love in the Time of Cholera, except I actually think the story in the Norton/Watts film is more touching as the characters realise their true selves in the midst of selflessly serving a diseased people.

The other thing that made me feel this was worth writing about is there is a telling dialogue from a Catholic missionary nun which adds further fodder to the debate about how Christian leadership is portrayed on screen. I forget the exact lines but the Mother Superior of the convent sits Naomi Watts’ character (Kitty Fane) down and explains that her (the nun’s) relationship to God is like a marriage. She had a lot of passion in her earlier years but now her relationship to God is likened to an old couple who sit in the same room but don’t talk – they have their duties to perform and this is enough. It’s an achingly sad description of what can happen to Christian missionaries or leaders but it’s probably quite accurate in many cases. The Mother Superior, resigned to this life of duty without a deep sense of love, utters some of the most thought-provoking lines in the film: “Remember that it is nothing to do your duty. That is demanded of you and is no more meritorious than to wash your hands when they are dirty. The only thing that counts is the love of duty; when love and duty are one, then grace is in you and you will enjoy a happiness which passes all understanding.”

(Following a google search, I should thank the Catholic journal “First Things” for providing the quote in an interesting discussion about the book).

 

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there will be blood / ER

March 30, 2008

Going to the cinema is such a luxury these days for Rach and I that we try and make the best of it when we do go. So, over Easter we picked the Oscar-winning Daniel Day-Lewis in “There will be blood”. The Portuguese title for the film was “Sangue Negro” (Black Blood) which I prefer, actually. Anyway, there is a lot about this epic and occasionally surreal film to make it well worth watching. Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead’s astonishing soundtrack imports his bands trademark production of choppy, terse musical accompaniment to the struggles of life. Day-Lewis, from his upright stature and gait to the execution of his lines is staggeringly good as the oil-hungry Daniel Fairview. The directing and cinemography is bold and the plot, complete with crackpot ending, had enough twists and turns to keep us talking for several days after we’d seen it.

The film may be many things, but it’s difficult to ignore the stinging indictment on capitalism in how the drive to compete and accrue wealth hollows out a man, leaving him by the final frames of this story, devoid of humanity. In this respect, it shares a lot in common with Citizen Kane: the film that kept coming to mind as I watched There will be blood. Perhaps, the critique is not unexpected; after all, TWBB is based on a novel by the socialist author Upton Sinclair. With this in mind, it’s also not unexpected to see the church painted in a dim light as it’s prominant spokesman in the movie – Eli Sunday – starts off as an effective sensationalist pastor who, by the film’s conclusion, is renouncing his faith in the name of oil profits. The motivation of this religious leader is portrayed not as the pursuit of God (even if he thinks it is to start with), but, like everyone else, the ceaseless and selfish pursuit of personal gain. For me, it’s another sad indication of mainstream cinema (and generally western arts) choosing to pick up on the seedier history of Christian leadership and failing to portray – or at the very least, acknowledge – that for some Christians at some points in history personal and material advancement were not in the slightest bit real motivations for their actions and that a pursuit of God could be genuine and not mask some baser need.

Strangely, I thought about this with reference to a clip from ER someone showed me recently. In the scene (below) a dying man calls on a chaplain to explain where he stands before God. The chaplain, an attractive woman, has nothing but banal generalities which, as the scene progresses, infuriates the patient. The bed-ridden man sends the chaplain away demanding someone come forward who will give him a real account of his eternal destination. It’s a refreshing turn around from the writers of ER – that rare thing: a character crying out for clear, uncompromising Christian leadership and answers to the biggest questions of life and death. In the clip below it’s not clear if that call is ever heeded. The ER story was picked up by the evangelist Ray Comfort who turns it into a presentation of the Christian message. Over 50,000 have seen Ray Comfort’s YouTube clip but I have no idea if his message has been a case of preaching to the converted choir. If not, what do people with no Christian faith make of the “hi-jacking” of popular culture into an opportunity to propogate the Christian message? It’s an example of the Acts 17 model of evangelism – start in culture, end with Christ.

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r.e.m. accelerate

March 18, 2008

Man, have we been waiting for this one. I haven’t been this excited about an R.E.M. record since about 1996. Producer Jacknife Lee is quoted as saying he wanted this album to be “thrilling”. It’s an apt appraisal of the final product. If R.E.M. got a bit lost in the woods over the last few records, they’ve turned around and retraced their steps down paths they know well. But, Accelerate is more than just an old formula rehashed. R.E.M. have never so ruthlessly trimmed their songs down to the lean and mean essentials. This economy gives Accelerate a focus, a spark, a sharpness that is already making 2008 a special year for R.E.M. and their fans.

Before we get down to the songs themselves it’s worth pointing out that there is a curious symmetry to the record. Plum in the middle of the album is the title track, Accelerate, and tracks 5-1 and 7-11 ripple out from the centre, often mirroring each other to the outer edges.

As for Accelerate itself, it’s possibly the weakest track on the record, which is not to say it’s bad, just that it isn’t great. Sonically, it sounds like a hybrid of Star 69 and Circus Envy off Monster. For all the power chords and earnestness it never rises above the sum of its parts. And, unlike almost every other track of the record, it lacks a comic wink or cheeky flourish. I suspect once released of some of it’s studio gumpf, it may translate better live as a raw rocker.

Flanking Accelerate are tracks 5 and 7, both folky ditties set to a bed of picked acoustic guitars in 6/8 time. Houston might be an Out of Time offcut if it wasn’t for the grizzly, dirty, throbbing organ that squats itself over the verses. Houston is supposed to be inspired by incidents and comments surrounding victims of Hurricane Katrina. It may well be intentional, but those overdrived organs don’t half sound like waves busting flood barriers – it’s a deft instrumental touch that lifts the song nicely. Until the Day is Done is delicate and shimmering. It is a close musical cousin of Try not to breathe – a song with space and just a hint of “unresolvedness”. Lyrically and musically both songs ask questions but provide few answers. “What have I done?” sings Michael Stipe forlornly over the middle 8. The question has a double meaning. This destruction is somehow my fault: what have I done? And in the weeks following the crisis, what have I done to help? 

Hollow Man is a lemon slice of power pop. It suffers from some predict-a-chord and predict-a-rhyme moments but generally, given the last three records, it’s just so nice to hear R.E.M. bouncing and having fun. Mr. Richards is more or less an example of the one-chord-verse R.E.M. song (think Finest Worksong, Me in Honey) with overdrived guitars pulled from Monster and NAIHF. It’s a perfectly adequate album track, but it suffers from some heavy-handed production which compresses Michael’s vocals into a stifling tube.

Now, to tracks 3 and 9 – Supernatural Superserious and Sing for the Submarine – songs with titles that rely heavily on the use of the letter “s”. Both tracks chug along briskly and have more ornate arrangements than the majority of songs on the album. Supernatural Superserious launched this album well and the track sits comfortably mid-way through the first half of the record. (That’s my favourite fan-mixed video up there – by AFN). Sing for the Submarine is a bizarre song and I think unlike any other R.E.M. have written. On first listen Mercury Rev’s “Deserters songs” LP with a whiff of speeded up (should that be accelerated?) Chorus and the Ring came to mind.  I also can’t help think of the Beatles Yellow Submarine or even some Pink Floyd. The lyrics (not to mention some of the guitar work) are psychedelic and self-reference the band’s own back catalogue. Sing for the Submarine may be the album’s only example of R.E.M. breaking new ground as musicians. That being said, I’m still undecided if it’s actually any good.

And so finally to the beginning and to the end. Living Well is the Best Revenge followed by Man-Sized Wreath is the best opening 1-2 punch that R.E.M. have set to record since Life’s Rich Pageant. Horse to Water and I’m Gonna DJ repeat the trick at the back end of the album, flinging the listener out the record’s back door. The opening two salvos have grown-up nicely since the Dublin rehersals and Bill Rieflin’s drumming is crisp and chunky. The studio-added extra guitar parts really enhance what were already trademark catchy Rickenbacker hooks. Mills’ fretboard is getting a lot of work with popping, melodic basslines. Stipe growls through the tracks and spits out his cutting diatribes like a madman unleashed but just manages to temper his enthusiasm with the experience to deliver spot on vocal performances which come supplemented by the harmonising, cooing Mike Mills. And back down the other end of the record and we can ditto all of the above for Horse to Water. All three of those songs have been given a short back and sides which leave us listeners with a delicious slap to the face and not much else: 3 verses, 3 choruses, no extended introductions, no middle eights, no twiddly outros.

Opinions are divided about I’m Gonna DJ, but I’m in the “this is a great way to finish a record” camp. It’s certainly a brave song to write – the loopy song structure and even loopier lyrics have turned off some (the Uncut review gave this track 2/5) but for me it has irresistable charm. The quasi-gallows humour, the absurd apocalyptical images, the “wingle and the wangle”, the imploding of all that we’ve just heard: this song should be called Dying Well is the Best Revenge.

This album is the sound of R.E.M. in a drag car doing 0-60 in 3 seconds flat. It may not be the smoothest ride, but it certainly is exhilirating.

ps. Some of my favourite lyrics:

From Living Well: All you sad and lost apostles… flaring nostrils, choking on the bones you tossed to them…

From Man-Sized Wreath: Turn on the TV, what do I see? A pageantry of empty gestures all lined up for me, wow! I would have thought by now we would be ready to proceed… Nature abhors a vaccum, but what’s between your ears?

From Until the Day is done: So hold tight your babies and your guns.

Mr. Richards: Mr. Richards you’re forgiven for a narrow lack of vision, but the fires are still raging on. The public’s got opinions…

From Horse to Water: I could have kept my head down, I might have kept my mouth shut…

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the charlatans – you cross my path

March 17, 2008

The Charlatans survived the death of britpop by never really fully being a part of it. The Charlatans were knocking about earlier than that in early 90s Manchester as part of the so-called “Madchester Scene”. Also rans to The Stone Roses and The Happy Mondays, they’ve outlived those illustrious contemporaries and prolonged their career for close to twenty years. Their longetivity is surprising given that their frontman Ian Burgess’ is remarkably unspecial: he is a compotent showman, but little else. The Charlatans don’t really score extra points for musical virtuosity or songsmithery. If anything, the Charlatans have remained timeless by being sufficiently vague to dodge the rising and falling of the latest fads and fashions. It’s either that or their overuse of fruity organ sounds.

So, here we are in 2008 and their new release has been given out free online. It’s another example of the new business model in pop music of pushing tour and merchandise revenue over music sales which have been taking a beating ever since the invention of the internet. So this is a free lunch, but is it worth eating?

I’ve more or less ignored the Charlatans since their mid-90s hey-day albums The Charlatans and Tellin’ Stories. Their record exec Alan McGee promises this is “their best record in years. They haven’t fulfilled their potential until now”. Well, it seems to me as if Mr. McGee is spinning a promotional yarn. Sure, the album is OK but there’s not a lot on here that’s going to garner heavy rotation on the nations ipods, certainly nothing that stands next to the Charlatans biggest hit “The Only One I know”.

It’s not all bad. Seeing as it’s free you may as well download the highlights. I would say these are 1) the first track and lead-off single “Oh Vanity” which has a gorgeous extended organ intro – see vid above. 2) “My Name is Despair” which I thought was the Verve until I remembered I was listening to the Charlatans. It’s a solid, slow-burner. 3) And the last track “This is the end” which finds the Charlatans in surprisingly jubilant mood.

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i am legend vs billy idol

February 3, 2008

I am Legend. According to Relevant Magazine this is the best film of the year. I just saw it in Brazil and my wife (a lifelong Will Smith fan) and I both agreed it was poor at best.

The start was good and they had me up to the point Will Smith’s character sees the ghostly backs of a huddled group of virus-stricken humans in the eerie blackness of some rooms under a bridge. After that, the film was caught between being a suspense mild-horror and a thought-provoking treatise on life as the only person on the planet. The latter storyline was far more interesting – and the film’s most intriguing scenes were of the main protagonist wrestling with his loneliness and his madness and with the existence or not of God. It’s interesting to me that seclusion might go hand in hand with a disbelief in God as is implied in the film. (A similar implication is made in the Count of Montecristo when the Count is locked up alone for several years). And yet by the end, and without giving away the plot, the involvement of God in the life of the world’s remaining humans becomes a possibility in I am Legend. These sort of questions are fascinating and would have made the film excellent if they were dealt with more thoroughly. For me, I would imagine the insanity of solitary confinement would sharpen my belief in God as the only thing to hold onto (see, for example, Richard Wurmbrand on this).

Sadly, the film only flirted with this line of thought. Instead, I was left with an annoyingly enduring memory of the CGD baddies. These were unoriginal to say the least – screaming, alien-like and wearing tattered rags. They seemed to be an almagamation of b-movie zombies, gollum from Lord of the Rings and something from a Billy Idol video (see above). A little more subtelty and less in-your-face cheap scares would not have gone amiss. I am Legend could have been great, but instead it felt like Will Smith had done a Kevin Costner in”Waterworld”. Nice idea, expensive effects, but ultimately overblown.

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r.e.m. live

January 15, 2008

R.E.M.’s first live album in their 27 year career has come at an odd time. Having picked up some momentum after their “working rehersals” in Dublin during the summer of 2007, they chose – or perhaps Warner chose – to give the fans something to ask for over Christmas. The rub is that these recordings are from the Irish leg of the Around the Sun tour, some two and a half years earlier. So, it feels a bit like a step backwards at first, but on repeated listens the live album stands up pretty well.

The double disc and DVD features songs from every one of R.E.M.’s 13 studio albums (and even one from 2008’s as yet unreleased Accelerate) save two – Murmur and Fables of the Reconstruction. The setlist was made up of songs from two night’s at Dublin’s Point Theatre at the end of the winter tour of 2005. Six songs from the Around the Sun album make the cut, and all of them sound better for the move to the live setting. The band fill out the songs well and vocally and instrumentally there is a real edge and urgency that the tepid studio versions of the tracks lack. Where the compilation suffers is in the inclusion of standard live tracks that already feature on R.E.M.’s previous two Live DVD’s Roadmovie and Perfect Square (2003). Including Man on the Moon, Everybody Hurts and Losing my Religion is taken for granted from a commercial point of view, and some newer singles justifiably get a look in – such as the Great Beyond and Imitation of Life. However, including The One I love and Orange Crush seems like over-cooking the soup. Both songs, albeit classics, have been around since the late 1980s and there is nothing that R.E.M. are doing with them now that they weren’t doing 10 years ago. Much better would have been the inclusion of rarities 7 Chinese Bros or Exhuming McCarthy which were both played at the Dublin shows.

Some of the comments on the R.E.M. sites I see suggest that fans aren’t too happy about Blue Leach’s production of the DVD which makes it look like the Michael Stipe solo performance with anonymous backing band. I can’t see how it could be any other way, though, when Mr.Stipe is clearly more interesting than everyone else on stage put together. After 27 years he still is the enigmatic, energetic front man. Personally, I think Blue Leach has done a stirling job and has given us more to watch than on the last two R.E.M. DVDs.

R.E.M. are weathering middle age fairly well and although this effort is unspectacular, it is comfortably professional.

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love in the time of cholera

January 12, 2008

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1985 novel gets a Hollywood reworking in the recent film of the same name. It is an average film, nothing about Shakira’s soundtrack or the cinematography or even the acting is spectacular, but it’s Marquez’s compelling and intense story -of a love triangle across an age – that carries viewers through and keeps their eyes fixed on the big screen.

I watched on a sweltering evening in Brazil’s biggest shopping centre in Recife – and it seemed an apporpriate venue. The movie drips with the culture, history and worldview of the Americas. More than this, it’s the characters that struck me as having quintessentially Latin souls. They are characters of extremes, no less than in the sort of anti-hero – Florentino Ariza – who is consumed by love for Fermina Daza and waits fifty years to ask her hand in marriage on the day of her ex-husband’s funeral. It all reminded me of a Shakespeare play – the protagonists are driven people, who dive with a reckless head-long passion into suffering, betrayal, love and even death.The characters are placed in the environment of a shifting Columbia at the turn of the last century and earlier. Their exploits are set within the context of exploration of the heart and of the land, of differing kinds of madness and tragedy and the ‘progress’ of scientific development. These conflicts are played out in the rivalry of the two men competing for Fermina’s heart. Jurvenal Urbino – a brilliant Doctor scientist but not a gifted spokesman or even lover, against the impetuous and at times immature Florentino, a romantic character lost in his poetry, in his definitions of love.

The film would have been even more authentic if it was in Spanish, rather than in faux-Spanish accented English. The token inclusion of staple Hollywood actors was more of a distraction too – I can’t help but think of Benjamin Bratt, who plays Urbino in the film, as Mr Congenialiy and Liev Schreiber as anything less than the dodgy cop from C.S.I. or Meryl Streep’s son in the Manchurian Candidate. On the plus side, the film was shot on location which help lift the film above being just a literary soap opera.

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