Dir. Peter Howitt
Laws of Attraction is a passable rom-com with a standard adversaries-become-lovers plot. Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play two of Manhattan's top divorce lawyers with very different styles (he's casual and often unscrupulous, she's straitlaced and takes the high road) who predictably fall for each other. Meanwhile, Michael Sheen and Parker Posey chip in gamely as an over-the-top rock star-fashion designer couple whose divorce proceedings pit the lawyers against each other.
There's a generous dose of Irish blarney as Moore and Brosnan, examining an Irish castle that's the centre of a divorce dispute, consume a bit too much ale and wind up inadvertently married. Brosnan and Moore's bickering and subsequent attempts at keeping up appearances constitute the film's attempts at generating sparks, but the pair's colossal dramatic talent falls flat in this comedy, and ultimately Laws suffers from an inescapable gravity.
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Dir. Peter Berg
Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights is set in the oil town of Odessa, Texas, a world in which football is religion. The film is shot to emphasise the flat landscape of Odessa, all heat and dust, the sheer emptiness of a town that has nothing to look for but the Friday night lights of the title. That sense of urgency pervades the game scenes of the film: you can almost feel the crunch as the adolescent bodies slam into each other.
With so much riding on each game, each play even, perhaps the best quality of the film is that it is not given to excessive sentimentality, understanding that any football season by itself contains a multitude of moving moments, a plethora of great storylines: the season-ending injury to a star player, the emergence of a rookie.
Of course, every good film about high school sports has a mentor coach figure, and leading the boys here is Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines. Gaines coaches with urgency but has the ability to rise above the unending second-guessing and the implicit threats.
Throughout the film, it's clear that football gives the boys their chance of escape, but at the cost of their youth. What does it mean to be 17 and have a town's expectations on your shoulders? What does it mean when the glory days of one's life are often over before one becomes an adult? (Tim McGraw is surprisingly good as a former high school football star living through his son, clinging on to the memory of winning the state championship, the one shining moment of his life.) Friday Night Lights shows, without sentimentality, life in this strange, inverted world, this world in which grown men look up to boys.
Tangential link: the Odessa American on Friday Night Lights: Ten Years Later
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Dirs. Chris Wedge and Carlos Saldanha
Made by the same people who made Ice Age, Robots moves from prehistoric animals to a world of robots and other sentient machines. The animated film tells the tale of Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor), a young hopeful inventor from Rivet Town who longs to make it as an inventor in Robot City and to meet Big Weld (a joyous Mel Brooks), head honcho of an eponymous firm and Rodney's idol.
A young person off to see a benevolent dictator who meets misfits along the way: how much more like the Wizard of Oz can the plot get? (Indeed, the Tin Man, perhaps the prototypical mechanical actor, makes a cameo in the film.) But as might be expected, the path of true invention never did run smooth: Big Weld has been absent from the helm of his firm, and in his absence, the villainous Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), egged on by his megalomaniacal mother Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), has taken over the running of Big Weld industries. Ratchet introduces - for shame! - the profit motive, thereby condemning to obsolescence the millions of robots who can't afford upgrades. Rodney thus has to team up with a ragtag bunch of misfit robots to save the day. Robots, inevitably, highlights the overarching importance of a firm's role as corporate citizen over its duty to shareholders. Or something like that - clearly in a post-Enron world rapacious corporations are the villains of choice, but it's surely a weird thing to posit that the corporation is the sole source and cure for all the world's ailments.
But enough about undertones: where Robots clearly stands out is on the surface - it's a beauty of a movie, and I only wish I could have seen it in IMAX. My chief complaint about the look of 3-D animated films has thus far been their overall sheen, which I find a bit dehumanising, but the shininess works to good effect in a film about machines. In Robots, skyscrapers gleam and the robots move with a certain mechanical grace, and the entire cityscape looks like some throwback to 50s sci-fi envisionings of the future. Indeed, the film is loaded with virtuoso visual displays - Rodney's ride into the city, in particular, is a Rube Goldbergian tour de force, leaving one literally dizzy from the view.
However, Robots, while pleasing, lacks the oomph that makes other animated films great. The film's insertion of the now-mandatory pop-cultural references for the adults (Fender goes "Singing in the Oil"; a visual reference to old Busby Berkeley movies) are entertaining enough, as is Robin Williams' trotting out of his stream-of-consciousness schtick again as Fender, the pieced-together sidekick. But with all that other comedic talent on board - Jennifer Coolidge as Aunt Fanny, a bot who has a load to take off her enormous rear, Broadbent, and Brooks - one would expect more zing in the jokes, at least to make up for the fact that the film's plot itself is standard "follow your heart" boilerplate. And Halle Berry is wasted as Cappy, Rodney's romantic interest - the couple don't get much time to interface.
Perhaps the best portion of Robots is its beginning, which is loaded with sly jokes about the assembly of Rodney (his dad missed the delivery, but hey, the fun part is making the baby), but ultimately, given that the film starts off with so much potential energy, it seems to need a bit of a charge.
Thought: Dory in Finding Nemo was a great sidekick if only because she departed from the chatty slick-talking character that too many of these animated films have (Donkey in Shrek, for instance).
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Dir. Mike Nichols
At his best Mike Nichols makes you never want to fall in love. His finest work - The Graduate (definitely on my personal favourite list of movies) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - always suggests that love implies the possibility of betrayal.
And so it goes: Nichols' Closer, while not his best, is an examination of the 'ever after' in 'happily ever after', looking what happens after the flush of a relationship dies in two (distractingly photogenic) couples - Alice (Natalie Portman) and Dan (Jude Law), as well as Larry (Clive Owens) and Anna (Julia Roberts). Indeed, just as much as romantic comedies often strip relationships down to the joy of boy meets girl, Closer strips relationships down to the aftermath, jump-cutting to the moments of pain, and showing that love comes with the power to hurt. Right from the outset, the film intertwines violence and love: Dan, an obituary writer, meets Alice on a London street, and she gets hit by a car, and the couple fall in love by flirting at the hospital. The film looks at the fallout of impulses, specifically Dan and Anna's affair, which leads to raw, sometimes inescapably childish, reactions.
One of the oldest bases for tragedy is the need to know everything: that need sets off an irreversible chain in Oedipus Rex, and here in Closer the need to know the facts about the affair first sends into a spiral Larry and Anna's relationship, and then breaks Alice and Dan's one. Yet there are no easy moral lessons to be drawn from the bitter words. Should there be bounds in a relationship, or scrupulous limitless honesty? And why should being honest obviate our moral responsibilities? Do we not have to be good, not just truthful? Will the truth really set anyone free? Or is truth just another option?
Closer was adapted by Patrick Marber from his own play, and it's easy to visualise all four characters stalking each other around the stage hurling their blistering verbal assaults, as they take very deliberate footsteps and stake their own territory: you can almost sense the stage blocking as each actor claims his or her physical space. Each member of the quartet also fiercely guards his or her verbal space, placing limits on what the other can and cannot say: one of Owens' best scenes comes as he spits out "don't say I'm too good for you".
So Closer depicts relationships as fluid dynamics of power. This is both seemingly deliberate, and an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that in none of the four pairings do the couples seem actually romantically attracted to each other. We end up analysing the four as victors and the vanquished, rather than equals in love; we end up looking for who has the upper hand. It's a fairly misanthropic way to look at the world, and I ended up having the same debate about Closer that I have about the films of Neil LaBute (arguably Closer's closest relatives in the world of film): do cutting words equal truly deep insight simply because they're so well-written and have so much bite?
So Closer comes across sometimes as acting exercises. Fortunately for the film, then, the acting is stunning. Law puts his quasi-detached style to good use here as a callow lover, while the always-excellent Clive Owen is a majestic brute, with terrible reserves of venom and vengefulness. But Natalie Portman is the revelation here: in what is perhaps her best acting since Beautiful Girls, Portman manages to come across as simultaneously the most vulnerable and the one with the strongest core in the quartet, the one whose young heart is on the cusp of breaking, but who ultimately retains her self-resolve and possession.
Ultimately, I don't know if you can say Closer is any deeper than the sting of its words: if you cut to a relationship's most agonising moments, wouldn't the resulting picture be as false as the shiny happy people of romantic comedies? Are detachment and degradation really the sole currency of modern romance? Probably not. Closer hardly provides deep insight into relationships, but in slicing to finely-acted moments of gashing pain, the film realises the exquisite masochism of watching relationships at their lowest.
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Everything that needs to be said about the winners has been said elsewhere - heck, the photos of the law firm of Swank, Eastwood, and Foxx are so oversplashed, I thought I'd put up a pic of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, who won for Best Documentary. So here's some random minor thoughts from yesterday's ceremony:
Nice that they cut to Alan Alda when Robert Richardson (the cinematography winner) was thanking those taking care of his mother in hospital - somehow you knew Alda would have a warm smile.
The step of making the "lesser nominees" (sound editing, visual editing, and so on) stand on stage was quite an ingenuous way of cutting back on the time spent on making them walk to stage. Giving out Oscars in the audience was just declasse though.
King Kaufman makes a good point, why all the rush?
I wonder the same thing about the Oscars that I do when I see people leaving close playoff games in the eighth inning or midway through the fourth quarter: What the heck is so important that you can't spare another half hour? Or an hour? If getting home, or going to bed, or whatever, is so important, just stay home, or just go to bed. Turn the recorder on.
The way making the show come in on time has become so emphasised makes it feel almost as if the producers of the show are so embarrassed by the product that they want to help us fast forward through it all.
I thought one of the sound editing winners made the very salient point that these are artistic, not "technical" awards. Pity films always have a D.P. but never a Director of Sound. And pity they made Antonio Banderas sing. (Dana Stevens charts the protest against this musical travesty.)
And Chris Rock? Didn't bring the pain. Admittedly it was partly because some of his audience members - cough Sean Penn cough - were humourless, but it didn't have his trademark zing. Personally, I feel Rock's best bits always have to do with personal responsibility (which is actually a conservative point of view, and probably why Slate called him the "William F-ing Buckley of Stand-Up"), and I'm not sure you can work that really well into an awards show.
And I hear the band playing, so I'm going to scarper from the stage. Thanks Mom and Dad, I love you!
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I used to write a music column for the Harvard Crimson back in 2000 and 2001, as fellow blogger Balderdash has discovered. That made me think of resuscitating some old ones, adding in the hyperlinks that a print column could never use and making minor amendments. I'll start with these thoughts on Eminem's "Stan" and Steely Dan, first published in March 2001 after the Grammys.
THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
The habit of sitting around discussing the meanings of songs people find cryptic has been a longstanding pop tradition. From "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" to "25 or 6 to 4," nothing has been taken at face value. Everything is subject to exegesis, as though any use of symbols, no matter how obvious, made a song deeper. How could "Puff the Magic Dragon" be a children's song? What does "Puff" mean anyway?
There's a trace of that crypto-divination in Eminem's "Stan" (for my money, one of the finest singles of 2001). "Stan" alludes to a fairly common urban legend, that Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" is about Collins helplessly standing in the distance watching a friend drown and seeing that someone else nearby could've saved his friend but didn't. ("You know that song by Phil Collins, "In the Air Tonight?" / About that guy who could have saved that other guy from drowning?") In reality, the Collins song is little more than a song about his impending divorce from his first wife. It's a little ironic, isn't it, that Eminem, a person who complains about overly literal interpretations of his text , gives in to the same thing?
Me, I'm ornery and I never believe in conspiracy theories. Best one I've heard, though, is the ludicrously elaborate one that claims the Pet Shop Boys stands for "Pray Eternally To Satan, He Offers Peace, But Owns Your Soul."
DECONSTRUCTING STEELY
What does Eminem share with Steely Dan? They're among some of the finest users of role play and distance in their songs.
That's not that minor or obvious a claim. In the pre-Grammy weeks, "He's just playing a role" was the most common defence of Mr Mathers, repeated ad infinitum, ad nauseum, as though that were the most natural thing for artists to do. But if you think about it, it isn't natural at all: what rock and rap music share is that they are rarely about telling someone else's story or inhabiting a character. They're musical forms that depend on direct experience – unsurprisingly, given the influence of the blues on rock, and of soul on rap, and given rap's emphasis on growing up in the street – so artists in both fields usually write songs that derive their power from the immediacy of having lived through what they're singing about. Part of why people love Public Enemy is that at some level you felt they knew "911 is a Joke" was a song of personal experience. (The ludicrous Duran Duran cover of that same song illustrates my point.) Even songs about other people are sung in one's own voice ("She Loves You"). That's probably part of why writing your own original material is given such cachet in rock. Consider, by contrast, vocals and standards: whoever blamed Sinatra for not writing his own material?
That's where Eminem and Steely Dan are rather different from their respective peers. There's little doubt that Eminem is street, and it's true that many rappers put on a stage persona – in all probability there's a gap between "Dr. Dre" and Andre Young. But those rappers tend to try to never show any cracks in the public persona, while Eminem often revels in the multiple personas he adopts – Slim Shady, Eminem, "Marshall Mathers" (quotes deliberate).
While Steely Dan don't use explicit personas, the duo's approach to rock is so deliberately dispassionate and cold – this is a duo named after a dildo (from Williams S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch), after all – that there's very little sense that they have lived through what they're singing about. Even in an ostensible love song like "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," their detachment makes them sound like they're imagining someone else singing. Compare this with the norm in rock music: where "Mick Jagger" the strutting hypersexual musical persona ends and Mick Jagger the strutting rock star begins is hard to tell. I'm not sure Mick himself knows.
That's not to say no other musical stars ever separate their personal selves from their work (David Bowie springs to mind). But for critics to assume that it's common for a pop music star to be detaching themselves from their words may be missing the point.
RETURN TO SENDER
Come to think of it, "Stan" is that rarity: a fully epistolary pop song. I tried to think of another pop song that told the whole story in letter-writing, and the closest I came up with was Pat Boone's "Dear John", and even that has a segment that isn't a letter. Any suggestions?
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Will post Oscar thoughts soon. Meantimes, Nerve.com's Film Issue is Excellent, capital E intended: Jonathan Lethem writes a paean to real sex on celluloid in "Donald Sutherland's Buttocks, or Sex in Movies For People Who Have Sex", while Bruce LaBruce highlights five of the most interesting taboo films, including Salò. Probably Not Safe For Work, but good food for thought for any film buff.
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So Patty turns out to be the gay Simpsons character. Not surprising, really, since this would involve the least changing of backstory. It's kind of sad that the running joke that Selma gets all the dates (despite them being identical twins) is ending this way, though.
Ken Tucker's blog has a post relating to the Patty marriage episode where he talks about how the show jabbed at religious institutions, which made me think: "the Simpsons" is one of the only shows on TV to consistently grapple with religion. Throughout the show religion is always present, whether it's in Homer deciding not to go to church or Lisa becoming a Buddhist. Even the minor jokes can centre on religion - when Marge has her skiing accident and Homer is deciding where to send her, the ambulance changes its destination from Beth Israel to St Mary's to Springfield Presbyterian in Goldilockian fashion.
(Incidentally, I didn't know Tucker wasn't writing for Entertainment Weekly any more - I really need to catch up on my EW reading.)
That willingness to actually debate religion's role and concomitant moral issues, as opposed to neutrally pretending it doesn't exist as most shows do, is one of the finest aspects of the Simpsons. And while it mocks religious pieties, it never ends up being condescending. It's probably why religious magazines like Christianity Today can debate the depiction of Ned Flanders.
Tangential link: SpringfieldIsForGayLoversofMarriage.com | The Religious Life of an Animated Sitcom
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The New York Times has a review of the Damien Hirst exhibit at the Boston MFA. I'm kind of torn on what to think of Hirst, whose work I first saw at the Tate, back in the days when the Tate was in Pimlico. Sometimes I feel he's just too obvious about modernity and soullessness, other times I really like the clinical nature of his work.
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Having just watched the clips on NBC's website, the American remake of "The Office" looks to me like an awful idea. For one, it's too shiny. By this I mean - the clips have a certain overly polished sheen, whereas the original version had that brilliantly awkward mockumentary feel to it. And for another, it just seems to be trying too hard to hammer in the "office life is terrible" theme. Of course, you can't judge a show by a few clips, but this does not look promising for a show whose original incarnation I love.
I'm no Britcom snob - anyone who knows comedic history can see the American antecedents in "The Office" (This is Spinal Tap, clearly). But the American remakes of "Coupling" and "Men Behaving Badly" were terrible. And they were on NBC too, if I recall correctly...
So Google gets it right:
Hell yeah, I meant "the office" BBC.
Tangential link: review of the original "Office"
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The baseball forum that I belong to likes to go off on tangential debates, and one right now is "what city has produced the most great musical acts"? Clearly of course London, New York, and LA would do well, but those are industry towns which wannabes tend to move to. Outside of that trio? Someone made a very good case for Manchester (the Smiths, Joy Division, the birth of club culture in the UK) being right up there, and some of the usual suspects (Detroit; Athens, Georgia; Nashville; Memphis; Seattle) were named. Here's the ones I named:
- Liverpool: home of the Beatles of course, but besides that: the La's (best one-album band ever?), Cast, Echo and the Bunnymen, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the KLF, the Lightning Seeds, Space, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Elvis Costello - debatable - definitely a Liverpudlian, but only really got his breaks in London.
- Minneapolis: Prince, the Replacements, Husker Du, Soul Asylum, Babes in Toyland, and Information Society. In terms of "influential" bands/performers Prince, the Replacements, and Husker Du are a pretty great trio. Minneapolis clearly batting way higher in influence than its population.
- Philadelphia: Of course there's Motown vs Stax, but in a soul-label tournament Gamble/Huff's Philadelphia International Records would stand a great chance of being in 3rd place, and that's no dishonour. I love the sound of Philly: MFSB, Teddy Pendergrass, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the O'Jays, the Stylistics. And the Gamble/Huff production team did some amazing stuff there back in the day. And of course the new soul movement is a Philly thing at heart - the Roots, Jill Scott, Jaguar Knight, Musiq.
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By Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin
(The Harvill Press)
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle starts off simply enough, when Toru Okada and his wife Kumiko lose their cat, and turns into a masterful novel, spanning philosophy, Japanese history, and metaphysics, among other things.
Toru Okada - or "Mr Wind-Up Bird", as his teenage neighbour May Kasahara calls him - has recently been unemployed, and tends the home while his wife Kumiko goes to work. Then elements of the surreal start creeping into his life. Two mystical sisters with the improbable names of Malta and Creta Kano appear and predict his future. A mysterious woman makes explicit phone calls. And somehow all this is connected to Okada's nemesis Noboru Wataya, and to the history of Japan and Manchukuo, its puppet state in northern China.
In the world of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, women occupy a space akin to a dreamscape: it's never fully clear whether they are corporeal or just apparitions in a dream. Even Kumiko leaves Toru, leaving only a mysterious missive. Yet this retreat into a dream world is unsurprising: the world of men in the novel is the world of war and politics, a world where people are skinned alive and brutalised with a baseball bat. It is the world of Nomonhon, of unfixed borders (that between Mongolia and Manchukuo, effectively the Soviet Union and Japan), where trespass causes punishment and hurt.
Indeed, the ways in which the past bears on the present form a constant strand of thought in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Much in the same way as horrific events set in place the irreversible path of fate in a Greek tragedy, the horrific past of the Japanese in China affects the present, intruding upon even the passive - and hence seemingly blameless - life of Toru Okada. Like a patient with repressed memories, the lack of acknowledgement of the facts merely leads to internalised conflict and pain, and at times haunting fragments of a collective unconscious inevitably escape. The effects of the past are felt either acutely - as in the psychic pains of the various women in the novel - or not at all, as seen in the numbed response to life of Lt. Mamiya upon his return to Japan from a Soviet labour camp. Eventually, Okada connects to a mother-son pair (named, naturally, Nutmeg and Cinnamon), and finds a bizarre job easing women's psychic burdens. And finally, as though acknowledging that passivity is not an appropriate response to the shattered world, Okada is forced into a series of very definitive actions in order to bring his wife back.
Stylistically, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force. Murakami excels, as always, in imbuing meaning into every little moment - the conversations between Toru and May seem to be bursting with a subtext of romantic and/or sexual interest, for instance. Throughout the novel, Murakami's beautiful descriptions seem to capture pure undistilled emotions - pain, suffering, longing; the sense of disquiet of that pervades his work is especially notable here. Yet the feeling of unease does not mean The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is above humour. One of the central premises of Del Close's Harold method of improv comedy is that you accept every proposition in the world, and this same bemused acceptance of the absurd is present here in Okada's wry responses and the general flat tone in which surreal events are described. So Okada's decision to rest at the bottom of a dry well and his subsequent passing through the wall of the well to an alternate world are no more and no less implausible in the novel than picking up dry-cleaning from the cleaners.
It's true that the plot of the novel doesn't quite cohere even at the end. Perhaps the various strands once unleashed were too numerous to pull together. But perhaps, too, feeling is first, and the inescapable aesthetic and philosophical responses to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle means the novel is one that sears itself into your consciousness.
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Just (re-)watched all three seasons of "The Office", Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchant's amazing comedy. The show is a mockumentary about a nondescript paper merchant in Slough, and it's spot-on about the levels of jealousy that occur when the stakes are small, as they are in office politics - all these petite fiefdoms and petty jealousies and puffed-up self-important egos ruling over empires of cubicles and staplers. (Question: when Scott Adams - of Dilbert fame - watches "The Office", does he feel a deep sense of being owned? Not that Dilbert is bad. But "The Office" is that good.)
"The Office" is strongly reminiscent of Christopher Guest's classic mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap in that it undercuts the very people it purports to depict, except that "The Office" makes one a lot more uncomfortable. That discomfort is rooted in its office setting - anyone who's worked in an office would have found moments in the show that hit a bit close to home. And therein lies its genius. "The Office" is painful enough to be funny, but not enough to revulse, a style of comedy of discomfort that's really hard to achieve.
That painfulness comes from countering a lot of television comedy conventions: "The Office" derives much of its humour from awkward silences, particularly following yet another David Brent (Gervais) faux pas, and from actors glancing away instead of facing the camera. Which is why we never get the sense that these are actors inhibiting roles - their uncomfortable responses are what you'd expect from regular people: long pauses, comic mistiming.
The titular office is populated by Brent, the boss and self-styled entertainer (after his sacking, he releases a hilarious soft-focus music video of "If You Don't Know Me By Now"); Gareth, the Territorial Army man who's utterly devoid of irony or the ability to read sarcasm; Tim, the wry voice of knowing weariness (his droll rolling of eyes into the camera is a comedic treat); and Dawn, the receptionist who Tim clearly is in love with, but who has a jerk of a fiance. Other characters, notably Keith the dry accountant, round up the supporting cast, but the show focuses mostly on these four leads.
Much of the humour of "The Office" comes from the contrast between Brent's image of himself as the ideal boss, and the pathetic leader he really is. Hence we see numerous self-aggrandising claims undercut by wry B-roll shots, and we have hilarious moments such as Brent singing his own composition ("Freelove Freeway") at a motivational talk. Yet, as noted in the commentary, while Gervais' blowhard character is the ostensible focus of the show, the relationship between Tim and Dawn (Lucy Davis) are the true heart of the show, driving its plot. Perhaps the classic example of this would be the last episode of season 2, where Tim rips off of the mike and runs in for one last chance to tell Dawn he loves her before she leaves for Florida and there's pure silence, not even the background hum or whirr of the office machinery: breaking out of the knowing satire on the tedium of office life to a moment that actually means something.
And Brent, for all his Napoleonic tendencies, comes across as sympathetic in the end, showing that the very fact of viewing a man's life on camera - even on a camera that is clearly being played to - can cause us to sympathise with him. (This phenomenon, of course, will be familiar to fans of "Curb Your Enthusiasm".) Clearly Brent means well and wants to be a good leader, even if his own evaluation of his charm is far removed from reality, and even if his desire to be liked can cause him to do pathetic things (at one office party, he does a dance in order to one-up Neil, his more popular boss, but ends up looking like a deranged orang utan) or to lash out.
"The Office" is scrupulously uncompromising about the depressing nature of spending 8 hours a day under the harsh sterile flourescent lights of offices, and its satirical style may not be to everyone's taste. But no less an assessor of comedy than David Letterman called it "possibly the greatest television programme of all time", and from this vantage point it's hard to disagree - if there's one detracting thing, it's that the show only has 14 episodes, counting the Christmas specials, but they are 14 perfectly-crafted episodes.
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With Martin Scorsese's The Aviator in theatres now, I thought I'd revisit an old film of his - after all, it's only one of the greatest concert films ever made. And what a film it is: true, The Last Waltz's star-studded lineup of the Band, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Ringo Starr, and others makes this a record of some kind of magic nexus of great musicians, but Scorsese also manages to make this a true film, rather than just concert footage spliced together.
The Last Waltz preserves the Band's final 1976 performance (held at San Francisco's justly famous Winterland) on celluloid, and it certainly brings one back to less slick times in concerts. There's a spontaneity to the performances, and an eccentricity as well - which modern performers would put someone onstage to read out the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, in Chaucerian English to boot? Which modern performers would risk the wrath of parts of their audience by asking a guest to read a poem that references the Lord's Prayer? Yet there Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are, respectively, onstage.
The Band was a group with the most anonymous of names, designed to emphasise the music over the individual members (the effortlessly multi-talented Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm). Although the members were largely Canadian, they slipped effortlessly across the border to form a quintessentially American roots band. The Last Waltz depicts a band in pursuit of their own musical interests, trends of the times be damned - pursuing roots music long before O Brother, Where Art Thou? sparked any sort of revival, for instance - and the film showcases the Band in two modes: as the finest backup musicians to roam the 70s, and as immensely talented headliners.
Interspersed with the songs are interviews with members of the Band that show their passion for the music and their grappling with fame. Perhaps it's a reflection of less guarded times, when rock stars were more willing to be confessional to the camera, or perhaps it just reflects Scorsese's masterful elicitation of responses; either way, The Last Waltz, unlike other concert films, manages to actually say something with the interview segments. Through the interviews, various strands of thought and musical interest are made clear, strands that are paralleled in the song choices.
And so the varied list of guest performers makes sense: rather than just clustering a constellation of stars, the Band was spotlighting its myriad tastes and influences, and so everyone from the Staples Singers (who add a lovely gospel lilt to "The Weight") to Eric Clapton (who has a great guitar duel with Robbie Robertson) to Muddy Waters makes an appearance. The Last Waltz captured the Band going out at their height. More than that, it also freezes in celluloid some of the musicians of the 70s at the peaks of their respective prowesses - Joni Mitchell, Clapton, Morrison (perhaps no finer live version of "Caravan" exists), and Emmylou Harris among them. Even Neil Diamond gives a credible performance here (of "Dry Your Eyes").
Scorsese's work in shaping the feel of The Last Waltz must be acknowledged. Throughout the interviews, there's a recurring sense of nostalgia among the band members for something lost as the Band grew famous, which, combined with their still-evident love of music, clearly lends the film a wistful tone, and the sense of one final hurrah captured. Like the band it depicts, The Last Waltz looks raw (thanks in part to Scorsese and DP Michael Chapman shooting the film in dark moody lighting) and yet is perfectly polished. Which is why it remains the jewel of concert films.
Tangential link: GreenCine on Rock on Film.
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(V2 Records)
They're playing Weller's cover of Sister Sledge's disco classic "Thinking of You" on the radio in these parts, which inspired me to pick this up. Studio 150 - named for the Amsterdam studio it was recorded in; certainly it's a less evocative name than Abbey Road - is Paul Weller's collection of covers, and the former lead singer of the Jam certainly takes on an unusual genre-spanning selection - everything from Neil Young's "Birds" to Rose Royce's "Wishing on a Star". It's great to know that while the Jam were creating such modern classics as "A Town Called Malice", they were also paying close attention to disco - I've noticed that the rock snobbery against disco seems a lot less pronounced in Britain - and indeed the general fascination with soul music first shown in the Jam's Motown covers is present here too, shown by the inclusion of Nolan Porter's Northern Soul classic "If I Could Only Be Sure" and Gil Scott-Heron's "The Bottle".
Weller certainly adds his own spin on the songs: the aforementioned "Thinking of You" is turned into a pensive piece for acoustic guitar, while the Burt Bacharach / Hal David classic "Close to You" acquires a horn section. He's more Style Council than Jam these days, the rasp in his voice sounding more wistful than outraged, all the better to go with the funked-up arrangements of many of these tunes.
The only qualification, really, is the inclusion of a (gospel-tinged) cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower": really, is there any point to covering a song Hendrix covered near-perfectly? Otherwise, Studio 150 finds the Modfather in fine form, imposing his unique style on his idiosyncratic choices.
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