Neutral Milk Hotel/Jeff Mangum at ATP

If you've had the misfortune of being around me when I'm terribly drunk, you've probably heard me slur emphatically:

"'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea'" by Neutral Milk Hotel is my favourite work of art in the world, in any medium, ever."

God but it is, peculiar, ugly-beautiful, with imagery rank and surreal, lyrics by turns introverted and weirdly celebratory, and great big orgasmic soundscapes. Orgasmic is the word, because the whole album is suffused with sticky, teenaged, fumbling sexual imagery. Despite being an album loosely based on telling Anne Frank's story (she of the diary and the annexe and the holocaust tragedy), ITAOTS has always being curiously resonant, like a musical distillation of my psyche. My psyche is a strange place, yo.

"Your father made foetuses with flesh-licking ladies, while you and your mother were asleep in the trailer park."

The album has been a musical confidante for 10 years now. I've changed a helluva lot, from an intensely lonely naif who'd never had a proper boyfriend, yet alone fallen in love, to a hardened, jaded ho-bag with a 1000 yard stare and a 1000 seedy stories to tell - but the album, like all good albums, kept up. It changed with me.

So seeing the driving force being Neutral Milk Hotel, front-man and lyricist Jeff Mangum, perform this weekend at All Tomorrow's Parties after 13 years of nearly no live performances (notable exception being a gig to raise money to help Kiwi legend and stroke-victim Chris Knox. British folks: fall in love with Knox by way of this tune) was Quite A Big Deal For Me. It's the first time, pre-a-gig, that I was nervous - anxious that Mangum would let me down, that the crushing weight of expectations of a girl who used to listen to his music in her bedroom on the other side of the world from him and weep 10 years ago could never be met.

"How strange it is to be anything at all"

Boy but did he deliver though. Boy. I saw him 3 times over 6 nights. Belting out lyrics with such intensity he looked like he was in pain, Mangum wasn't a chatty performer, looking to woo the crowd with wit. He just sung his soul out, pausing only to smile at the crowd singing along, enraptured. Ex-NMH-er Julian Koster would run onto stage like a magical musical pixie and wordlessly contribute singing-saw backings, then scamper back off before the songs finished. Asked over dinner by Alex what I thought after the first time we saw him, I got three words into a response and burst into tears. Weird happy tears. Strangest experience of a falafel burger ever.

"But don't take those pills your boyfriend gave you, you're too beautiful to die."

What I'm trying to say is this:

my friend Billy once described the joy of seeing Iron Maiden, who he very much loves, in concert, thus: "Ah, hell. Words can’t do this sort of thing justice. You had to see the light in people’s eyes after the gig. It was unique. It is something else entirely to genuinely know and love every song being played and experience a ridiculously awesome show. It was an immense happy making experience, and something I am very grateful to have experienced. I hope everyone loves a band this much, and gets to see them live sometime."

I remember reading Billy's description 3 years ago, and it sticking in my head.

I couldn't put what it was to see Jeff Mangum live any better than that.

[Apologies/thanks to Billy for ripping off his words whole-sale. His fault for being such a damn fine blogger]

My Favourite Woody Allen Movie

A blog post for Helen, because she was foolish enough to ask, Katie, what is your favourite Woody Allen film? Much deliberation followed. I am supposed to be writing my script for Ed. This script for Ed is proving to be my Moby Dick, ie something the majority of the world will never get around to reading. Largely because it is not finished. I digress.

I am something of an Allen apologist, having seen to date 39 of the films he wrote/directed, and one he wrote but didn't direct (Play It Again, Sam). That means I've seen a) most of those serious Bergmanesque films nobody else has bothered with and b) all of his mid-90s to mid-00s output the critics uniformly trounced upon, before everyone started bleating on about how he'd returned to form with Melinda and Melinda, then saw Match Point, liked it better, then bleated on about how he'd returned to form with that, then saw Scoop and Cassandra's Dream and wrote vociferously about how the randy old goat should just give up film-making.

Luckily Allen RETURNED TO FORM against all odds with Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but had the good sense to proceed to make two films no one much liked so that when last year's Midnight in Paris emerged it could seem like something of a miracle after his filmography had turned into such an arid wasteland for so long. Personally, I'd much rather watch a mid-90s Allen film than most any other rom-com from the same period, and I think that whilst the quality vacillated wildly and the jokes could often seem hackneyed, there was always something pleasurable to be found in Allen's later-era output, and often some considerable insight. Excepting, of course, Small Time Crooks. Which is just godawful. Nobody needs to see that movie. You should consider trying to contract gonorrhoea by systematically setting about having unprotected coitus with everyone you know, married or no, before thinking about watching Small Time Crooks.

I am sorry. I am getting off point.

MY FAVOURITE WOODY ALLEN MOVIE.
A Story By Katie. For Helen, who didn't really ask for it.

I am a terrible neurotic. And rather anxious, with it. Envious of intellectuals, whilst often considering myself to be intellectually superior to most people I interact with, for no good cause. Routinely preoccupied with the futility of existence, desperate to try to eke some meaning out of life, and prone to complicating otherwise simple and pleasurable things (particularly relationships) by overthinking them. I have a history of dating men who are considerably older than I am, and who have fractious relationships with their ex-wives.

My Woody-love isn't all that surprising, then.

Here are my top 6 Woody Allen movies of all time:

ZELIG
A man who is so unsure of his identity he morphs into a facsimile of whoever he's talking to at the time. A slight concept, brilliantly executed. One of Woody's funnier movies; also a summary of what I'm like socially.

ANOTHER WOMEN
Little seen, brilliant depiction of a woman who's more cerebral than emotive, and how that strains the relationships in her life. Gena Rowlands is brilliant in it. As is Gene Hackmack. Bittersweet and tinged with regret.

CRIMES AND MISDEMEANOURS
Before he made Match Point, he told more or less the same story, more adeptly, insightfully, and swiftly, in Crimes and Misdemeanours - with Martin Landau, a wealthy ophthalmologist looking to disentangle himself from his needy mistress, Angelica Huston. But Katie, you cry, why would I suffer through those turgid acting light-weights Landau and Huston when I could watch the fat-lipped Thespian artistry of Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Scarlett Johannsson telling the same tale in Match Point? Such poignantly vacant faces!

Why indeeeeeeeeeed?

It also features a beautiful counter-story, with Woody Allen and Mia Farrow as a comic underlings to the tragic mains, filming a documentary about a philosopher. This discussion in particular always resonated with me:

Love Paradox

HANNAH AND HER SISTERS
I actually want to put Husbands and Wives here, but admitting to liking Husbands and Wives is a bit like admitting to enjoying emotional sadomasochism. Or rather, it is exactly like that. Husbands and Wives is brutal. Hannah and Her Sisters, on the other hand, has Max Von Sydow, and Carrie Fisher at a time during her career when she was probably on buttloads of drugs.

MANHATTAN
Everybody has seen this film and if they don't love it already then nothing can be said in it's (or indeed, their) defence. I have yearned to receive a compliment half so good as this one:

Manhattan Compliment
Beautiful.

LOVE AND DEATH
Funniest. Woody Allen Movie. In Existence. Who doesn't love a good 19th Century Russian Epic Parody? There's a post on this youtube clip that says "lol this film makes smart people feels smart" which I suppose it does, but, really, there's not a whole heap of pretentiousness on offer in a scene such as this one:

Fuckoff Flirty Fans

... I don't think Woody Allen movies are especially profound, or offer the key to the universe. I think they are thoughtful, diverting, frequently very funny, and sometimes thought provoking. They play like a really, really good conversation with a particularly witty friend.

(The moral of the story is that my favourite Woody Allen movie is probably still Annie Hall, but I can't say that, because that's like saying your favourite sexual position is the missionary)



Woody Allen incarnate...

Nosferatu Versus Tron

Which is a grudge-match I'd pay to see, although I imagine it would be over fairly quickly. Count Orlok is pretty slow, and it's all very well being able to suck on blood and make people delirious and junk but a light-disc to the bollocks and his creepy vampiric arse'd deres faster than you could say - well - anything, inter-titles in silent movies tend to be on screen for AGES.

On Tuesday night we went to a screening of Nosferatu, accompanied by a live-score by a Melbourne composer called Worng*. I can't speak for y'all, but I'm feeling fatigued by the glut of fatuous vampire-themed film and television being spewed into the cultural atmosphere at the moment. Watching Nosferatu revivified my appreciation for the vampire genre - specifically, the possibilities of the vampire genre. Filmed in 1922, it didn't labour under the weight of telling a story previously told a thousand times - which made it far more compelling to watch than a story embarrassed by how often it's been recounted. The oily sexuality and existential angsting of modern vampire tales was also blessedly absent - Count Orlok is a freaky fucked-up blood-sucky bat-man, and so looks like a freaky fucked up blood-sucky bat-man. Which is refreshing. STEPHANIE MEYER FEEL BURNING CHEEKS OF SHAME.

The musical accompaniment was all synth-keyboards, styled after John Carpenter's scores with lashings of Tangerine Dream. They worked well within the film's more surreal moments - as when Hutter's wife falls into a somnambulant trance - but his attempts to ratchet up the horror during moments when Orlok was on the attack were far too aggressively 'scary' and actually detracted from the action. Horror music score-writers: unless you are Bernard Hermann, you are probably well-advised to keep the music subtle, otherwise you are likely to interrupt proceedings. (I don't know what I'm talking about here. Forgiveness Please).

Last night was Tron: Legacy at the Imax cinema 3D. Unusually for a blockbuster, I was left wishing they'd attempted less story - nonsense involving long-lost fathers and blah blah blah - and just followed the formula of the first film, which was to splurge out a tenuous explanation in the film's opening salvo and then DO NOTHING BUT HAVE SUPER COOL GAMES AND SET-PIECES FOR 60 MINUTES. Instead proceedings were periodically interrupted for 'plot.' I mean, come on. This is tron. Don't arse around with plot, PLAY THE SUPER COOL GAMES ALREADY.

I found it really rather beautiful, a wonderfully rendered sci-fi landscape, which there seem to be a dearth of, and the Daft Punk soundtrack worked just as well as you'd hope. Michael Sheen popped up for a good ten minutes and left me squealing with orgiastic glee, and then disappeared and left me saddened because the best actor in the film had disappeared. The fem-program eye-candy is hella hot, and Jeff Bridges is always likeable, even if the digitally-rendered 30-year-old version of him was languishing hopelessly in the Uncanny Valley . This didn't feel revolutionary the way the original film did (because it was revolutionary) - though it certainly was pretty - but without wanting to labour a point, everything would have run a lot smoother if they'd attempted less and done nothing but PLAY SUPER COOL GAMES.

*This is a stupid name.

A few of the movies I've seen lately.

Unforgiven (1992, Eastwood)

I watched this directly in the wake of watching ‘Walkabout’ ‘Days of Heaven’ and ‘Solaris,’ and in comparison with the verbal reserve and lyricism of the language used in those three movies the dialogue here seemed down-right ham-fisted and obvious. So clearly I wasn’t giving the film a fair chance – and consequently I was underwhelmed. I understand the place the film occupies in cinematic legacy – the aware return of Clint Eastwood to a genre he epitomised and then innovated within (full credit due to Sergio Leone) – and the revivification of said-genre this film was meant to represent – but 18 years on it feels dated and vaguely irrelevant. It is fun, and bloody, and dark, but lacks brilliancy. Also – Clint Eastwood is a charismatic presence but I’m pretty sure he just Can’t Act.

Having said that, Gene Hackman* merely has to half-smile and look bemused and flaming jets of thespian awesomeness scream off the screen. If this movie has any particular distinguishing excellence, it is contained entirely in Hackman’s performance.

*For some reason I kept typing ‘Hackmack.’ Must give serious thought to changing my surname to ‘Hackmack.’

Ran (Kurosawa, 1985)

Akira Kurosawa transplants the story of King Lear to a period Japanese setting, explores issues of mortality and the impotence of old-age. Colour-coded costuming, shrill arguments and extended bloodshed ensues.

Oh me-oh-my this was bo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ring. Yowsers. There’s a looooong battle sequence towards the film’s conclusion during which I got so bored I took to hitting my leg with a fry-pan just to feel alive, accidentally hit too hard, broke my leg in two places, had it set in a cast, healed the breaks, underwent palliative care and completely recovered full function of my leg before looking up to discover the damnable battle sequence was Still Dragging On.

To give it it’s due: it is gorgeous. It is the kind of film the phrase ‘indelible imagery’ lies in wait for, hoping to describe. And there is a scene, inspiration cribbed from Richard III in which Lady Kaede threatens her brother-in-law with death (even taking a knife to and cutting his throat) before turning on a dime to seduce him – which is flat-out spellbinding (she licks the wound she’s just inflicted). Unfortunately nothing else happened during the film’s running time that had me as entranced as that one sequence.

Whilst Ran doesn’t invite comparison with its source material, King Lear, my mental processes are so facile that I spent much of the running time considering why I liked Big Willy’s play so much more. And then I figured out something that informs my tastes in cinema a great deal. To sum up: I prefer figurative imagery to literal imagery.

To explain sum up: in the film, King Hidetori’s torment is more or less literally displayed. He experiences anguish, he screams and cries. He experiences rage, he lashes out. The film doesn’t utilise the poetic language or musings of Shakespeare’s play: just the plot.

Now, I love Shakespeare but I wouldn’t call him the plot king. In fact, I would say his plots are often a tad fucking awful. I mean, his plays are full of interesting happenstances and nary-a-dull-moment, but you don’t tend to come away from them going “oh, that was an impeccably structured narrative in which a succession of events organically grew one from the ‘tother to a logical-yet-surprising-conclusion.” You tend to go “oh, that bit there was a bit contrived but who cares because it was fucking awesome and everyone ended up carcing it/fucking at the end [depending on whether or not it was a tragedy/comedy]”

Ran lifts nothing from the Shakespeare play but the plot and displays it in its basest, most literal terms. Which means all the stuff that I love about Shakespeare is gone. The characterisations. The prevaricating. The figurative imagery. To wit – when Lear goes barmy he delivers his famous monologue:

‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head!”

Which I find just lovely, because on the one hand you have this marvellously evocative description of nature at its most violent, but mapped onto that is your comprehension of Lear’s psyche at its breaking point. The power of the description provides depth to Lear’s dilemma.

And I find this poly-syllabic dual-purpose verbiage must more satisfying than just watching Hidetori go a bit mad and wail at the sky.

But I’m odd like that.

Army of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969)

Or, here are a handful of Frenchies who weren’t cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

You should watch this film, it is stone-cold cool. It depicts the struggle of a group of French resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France. It's director, Jean-Pierre Melville, is often cited as a major influence on Michael Mann, and you can see the correlations clearly - there is the same spare, cool, stylised aesthetic, characters all act in accordance with a personalised higher code, 'cept for the weasles (and nobody likes the weasles), and violence, when it does happen, is brutal, swift, unglamorous, and -well, fatal. There is a scene in Army of Shadows where the protagonist Phillipe Gerbier watches an informant be suffocated to death
and Phillipe's face is impassive throughout - cinematic violence is rarely this matter-of-fact. That the same man later dallies and exhibits great fear at having to parachute out of a plane speaks to the subtle competency of characterisation.

Whilst I'm mentioning characters - there is a woman named Mathilde, who essentailly runs logistics for the fighters. She is amazing. She is such a dude. She is shrewd, indomitable, unflinching, tough, and loving. One of the best film characters I've seen in a while.

You should watch Army of Shadows, it's cool.

More to come, I think.

Agora (Amenabar, 2009)

Agora is set in Alexandria around 400 AD, where Hypatia (who is smoking hot, if remarkably pale for someone living in Egypt before the advent of SPF30) teaches mathematical and astronomical theory at the Platonic school. Greco-Roman polytheism is being challenged and declining due to the rise of Roman Christianity. This is a bloody, brutal, nasty transition, complicated further by the Jews, who want to get in on the barracking and blood-shedding and righteously indignant action. Violence is perpetrated by all sides, although Amenabar takes especial care in drawing attention to the brutality with which the Christians peddled their faith. In the midst of this tumult, Hypatia just wants to think and read and theorise, specifically to figure out what the deal is with the movements of the planets and the sun. But her wanton intellectual pursuits are complicated by the oppressive dictates of Christian rule; and her interactions with the prefect Orestes and a Bishop-what-name-escapes-me-but-sounds-like-Cyril . . .

This movie was an absolute pleasure. Hypatia is depicted as dignified, inquisitive, humanitarian and driven. The fact that she is a woman is conspicuous, obviously, but never relied upon to demarcate her as extraordinary (her extraordariness does that). Recreation of the ancient city of Alexandria (including the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the lost Seven Wonders of the Ancient World) feels complete and never draws attention to the CGI involved. What was Most Excellent though was the premium the movie put on ideas and thoughts – the characters were invested in them, in higher principals, something beyond quotidian existence. How often do you see an action sequence predicated on people desperately trying to preserve texts within a Library? Or a woman weeping at the thought of knowledge being destroyed? No doubt you, like me, are disheartened by the dearth of intelligent, self-possessed female characters in modern cinema – Hypatia is a salve to that heartache.

Amenabar’s previous offerings include Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), which is notable as being the somewhat superior Spanish flick Vanilla Sky was based upon (although I champion Vanilla Sky as an effective headfuck of a film, even if Tom Cruise’s gurning rankles) and The Others, which is notable for being a bit pants, if intelligently crafted. Agora demonstrates further Amenabar's willful desire to make idiosyncratic films of substance.

Agora was the highest grossing film in Spain last year but unfortunately does not seem to have been embraced by the global market. Which is ridiculous. It has an epic scale, intelligent performances, and discusses weighty issues in an accessible manner. In a world of Platonic ideals, this would be the average film you saw when you headed to the multiplex. Such as it is it’s well worth the trip to an your local arthouse cinema; the epic representation of Alexandria rewards big-screen viewing.

(Stray observation: thanks to an excessive consumption of Asterix and Monty Python in my youth, I cannot see a roman garrison without giggling)

(Stray observation 2: Rachel Weisz (who plays Hypatia) is so very, very, terribly lovely)

Days of Heaven. Not to be confused with Days of Thunder (Malick, 1978)

Chicago reprobate Bill, his lover Abby (who poses as his sister) and his actual sister Linda harvest crops on the Texas Panhandle in 1916. A wealthy farmer with the soulful eyes of Sam Shepard falls in love with Abby and proposes marriage. Simmering emotional tension and then violent emotional outbursts ensue.

Days of Heaven mirrors Malick’s debut film, Badlands, in that it follows a violent tempered man who is beloved by an innocent woman rendered guilty by her compliance with evil. In both films, the actions of the man is viewed obliquely, through the prosaic yet poetic voice-over of a teenaged girl (in Heaven, this is provided by the man’s younger sister. His ACTUAL sister, not the fake-sister lover, mind). Heaven feels like the more-melancholy, more-taciturn twin sister of Badlands. I will stop mentioning sisters now; it’s getting confusing.

The film thrums with an undercurrent of volatile passion, though there is a curious reserve when observing the feelings of the three lovers. In moments of heated argument the words cut out, and the violence occurs accompanied by over-powering music. I have read some critiques of the film that claims this keeps the audience at arm’s length and dampens the emotion. I completely disagree, and found this technique instead showed Malick understands his audience will intuit emotional nuances themselves. So much of Days of Heaven’s romantic plot is told through simmering looks, loaded pauses – that when this tension is released in argument and aggression words aren’t needed to explain. It’s all rudimentary human nature.

That sense of threat and its transformation into sudden violence is mirrored through the natural elements in the film. Early on shots of animals in the undergrowth are juxtaposed with shots of the blades of the combine harvester bearing perilously close to them. Towards the film’s conclusion, the wheat crops are disastrously set upon by locusts, shortly before the love triangle devolves into a catastrophe of a different sort.

The locusts are biblical-styled portent, clearly, and the plot itself is cribbed wholesale from the Old Testament (see: Abraham, Sarah, and the Pharoah. Abraham’s kind of a cock, yo). These ye-olde elements lend what is a slight narrative a deeper resonance: this seems to be a tale told out of time. Brutality is endemic in human nature and in the natural element now as it always has been.

But enough flim-flam. The most important thing you need to know, if you haven’t seen it, is that this is a stone-cold-gorgeous fucking film. Much of it was shot during the mythical ‘golden hour’ – the misnomered 25-minutes or so before the sun sets each day. The images are all dipped in amber honey, this is a film you could easily watch with the sound off and an accompanying Pink Floyd album and only be marginally irritated by the terrible fucking racket playing as you watched the pretty pictures.

Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)

Having previously seen and very much liked the 2002 Soderbergh remake of the same name, I was curious to watch the original, hopeful it wouldn't diminish my appreciation of the remake. Which it did, illuminating Soderbergh's film as an accomplished, throbbing little nothing of a film - it's existence perhaps best justified by establishing just how great Tarkovsky's masterpiece was by comparison (Although it did provide the world with one of Cliff Martinez's very best and most seductive soundtracks. Swoon).

Plot summary: Russian psychologist Kris Kalvin heads to space-station by sentient planet, which scans his brain and creates a corporeal though indestructible recreation of Kalvin's long-dead suicidal wife. Hilarious hi-jinks (read: slow, heart-breaking discussions of the situation) ensue; George Clooney's bottom is mercifully absent throughout.

The film, then, is an unsettling {especially the last few frames, which wigged me out more than any cinematic denouement since the last few scene of Kaufmann's Invasion of the Body Snatchers), moving exploration of love - specifically the limitations of love, illuminating how when we love, we necessarily love our idea of that person, rather than the person itself. This is, in the words of Sick Boy, beautifully-fucking-illustrated, as the woman who appears on the space station only has as much knowledge of herself as Kris Kalvin had of his dead wife. If the most common problem with Sci-Fi can be argued to be the way it renders character subordinate to speculation (and that's a big 'if' - I am not saying this is definitively the case, but I would argue it is easy to cite many, many examples within the Sci-Fi genre of characters being ciphers to events), Solaris stands as a stark rebuke to that argument - it is difficult to think of many films more moored in human emotion. The character's actions seem to be consequences of their feelings, rather than machinations designed to serve the plot or theme.

What struck me most about the film was how its slow, meditative takes (sections such as Burton driving on the highway run for minutes, without any notable action occurring) were utterly entrancing and seductive, rather than irritating. Ebert notes these passages in Tarkovsky films allow the audience respite to consider the philosophical implications of what has occurred before, and I am inclined to agree.

The ponderous length and the long-takes, seductive as they are, stuck in my head because there is something ineffable in film when these go right. When executed well, as done here, (Malick springs to mind as a similar successful example) slow, steady, action-light shots encourage an almost hypnotic involvement with the film - in the past I've likened it to giving the mind a bath. When done poorly (as I would argue is the case in Werckmeister Harmonies, or fucking fuckity-fucken Uzak) they are maddening and woefully pretentious. But I'll be a monkey's uncle if I can directly pinpoint what separates the successful examples from the failures.

To sum up: Solaris, brillo-pads wee flick. 3 hours of ponderous Russian filmic goodness.