February 8, 2010

BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #4: ARCADE FIRE - FUNERAL

Remember those ads for THE DARK KNIGHT: "Why So Serious?" I'd like to ask that question to Win Butler and his memorial to a burning arcade, but I'm afraid he might cheer up. Butler's seriousness - one part Eeyore, one part U2, one parts a Clash-esque group of freedom fighters with guitars instead of guns - has resulted in two loud, seriously interesting albums. As I noted re: NEON BIBLE, there's nothing here that reeks of irony or the silliness that most bands indulge even amidst talking about pain and memory.

A lot of people have read the first song, "Neighborhood #1: Tunnels" as some of post-apocalyptic nightmare. I don't: it seems like a nine year old boy try to talk a nine year old girl into running away with him and imagining the future. But what does he imagine in the future? Missing his parents. But the closing lines, where a "golden hymn" is capable of "purifying" his mind seems to be more mission statement than metaphor. We are dealing with someone who thinks music can change the world, who writes rock and roll polemics about being enslaved by modernity, and who harbors no mythologies about his childhood yet misses it dreadfully.

A lot of people think I'm taking their solemnity too seriously (haha), but I've yet to find any moment that seems like a throw-away. The second song compares a prodigalolder brother to a Russian dog who was sent to space to die. The Neighborhood is a prison, parents are wardens who we love nonetheless; the images of the neighborhood possess an otherworldly mystery: the shadows and streetlights hide secrets.

A while back I read a tome called GEOGRAPHY OF NOWHERE by some Rolling Stone writer, which did a pretty thorough (if typical) job of tracing the suburb from its earliest development and makes grim predictions (in 1993) that have more or less come true. If anything, that narrative seems a little familiar, and the Arcade Fire has done a nice job of complicating that. No matter how mechanical the reproduction of suburbs are, we will invest our "neighborhoods" with meaning nonetheless. We will memorialize its mysteries, amplify its secrets, mythologize its events, and make it the idyllic place it never was. And then we won't, which is why the words "Wake Up" are divested of their empowering potential: in this case, it's necessary to adjust, to feel things deeper, and to realize that its all a lie.

I admit my analysis of this album is sketchy. I really don't have the skills to do it justice. But if you can tell me that the last lines of the album harbor some hope, you'll defy me. Instead I think these guys are like Jeremiah-esque prophets, deeply invested in some tragedies that the rest of us ignore. Those lyrics:

I like the peace
in the backseat,
I don't have to drive,
I don't have to speak,
I can watch the country side
Alice died
in the night,
I've been learning to drive.
My whole life,
I've been learning.

| By Andytown | 7:28 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2010

BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE #5: CLEM SNIDE - YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC

(FYI: This album might have actually been released in 1999 - according to the Wikipedia anyway. If you care about this, let me know and I'll mail you an apology sometime before my best of the 2010s list)

Nothing about Eef Barzelay, or the band he acts as an almost non-existent primary factor of, the rotating entity called Clem Snide is fairly original. Eef is a poet of melancholy, as were many others, and his band plays something between Alt-Country and standard Indie-Rock - this very fair Pitchfork review says so, and it's right. The band is neither particularly innovate or interesting in terms of what its been doing in a period when bands hop to the forefront by being innovate and interesting. Which is why you may not have heard of YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC, my favorite Clem Snide album (BTW, Pitchfork gave this a hyperbolically bad 2.1, saying it "begs for laugh tracks").

If Bob Dylan's melancholy was contrived to sound original, Eef's is so original it sounds contrived. When he sings, "Tonight we're going to party like its 1989," he reminds listeners like me that he participated in the same pop cultural phenomenons, and has been just as disappointed in them as harbingers of the exciting new era they were supposed to bring. 1989 had the Berlin Wall falling, and yet it was still kind of boring - there are things going on here that you might at first scoff at; like Clem Snide is being funny in the same way everyone else is. But they aren't.

THE GHOST OF FASHION, the album that followed, largely eschewed the somber melodies of this album and was their most critically and commercially popular - it featured the opening credits song to the cult-TV hit ED, but it was scrapped for the Foo Fighters song from the first season. GHOST rocks a little harder. I like listening to it, along with 2003's SOFT SPOT and 2005's END OF LOVE. But YOUR FAVORITE MUSIC combines both intimate sadness with Eef's recognition that he has to explain it. "Your Favorite Music," the title track only "makes you sad" - this is as trenchant an explanation as Nick Hornby's opening question from HIGH FIDELITY (paraphrased): "What came first, the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or Am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"

I wrote an unsuccessful statement of purpose for grad school around Eef's transcendent "I Love the Unknown," a loose narrative about a guy who quits the job his dad gave him, refuses to love the girl who loves him, rides buses to nowhere, and tells a psychiatrist that he's afraid of "going through life feeling numb." And when he tells us in "Messiah Complex Blues" that "I wouldn't die for your sins," it's at once a rejection of faith and an endorsement of the idea of a Messiah. Nobody working in popular music has dealt with issues of faith and spirituality like Barzelay; as a cultural commentator, he's incisive without making each song a polemic. It's a shame Johnny Cash died before he could cover "Messiah Complex Blues" (or a number of CS songs; my dream album would be AMERICA V: CASH COVERS CLEM SNIDE).

Maybe, like the "favorite music" to which the title indicates, this album is supposed to make you sad. But it ends up always making me feel like I have a fellow traveler, someone who can't really articulate what's going on, but wants to bring the night alive with laughs, as he suggests as an anecdote to the awful party in "1989." I suppose everyone doesn't want to spend time with that guy, who realizes that the party isn't any fun but anticipates making fun of it later. He's kind of like that "Debby Downer" character from SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but I think you can see that mixed in a with a desire for something awesome, something "unknown," that creaks out from behind the sad violins and ironic horns. You feel like you know him.

So there's one last shoutout for my favorite band who no one has heard of.

| By Andytown | 1:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 4, 2010

TOP 50 ALBUMS OF THE DECADE: 10-6

10. The Strokes, IS THIS IT?

I immediately caught onto The Strokes, hopping on an already full-to-capacity bandwagon, because they seemed loud, disgusting, and vaguely untalented. But they've proved anything but - after a few years adopting the personas of lounge singers, they're something an elder statesmen to bands who are much, much worse than them, and maybe Julian Casablancas reformed by seeing what junk he spawned. Yes this album is influential and its influence is, mostly, not very good. But I like to think of it in terms of ITS influences - Velvet Underground and Guided by Voices among them. And while this album probably isn't as incendiary as it seemed in 2001 (wow), what with the gloved hand touching the woman's bottom and all, it is only bad if you've listened to it 200 times. And I have and I still like it.

"Hard to Explain" remains one of my favorite songs of the decade - a loud homage to the kind of music they liked -

Raised in Carolina, she says:
" I'm not like that"
Trying to remind her
When we go back

I realize that devil-may-care is usually used to refer to profligate sons of extremely religious shopowners from the 1800s, but it seems to fit the vibe of the Strokes lyricizing. When they announce, in "Hard to Explain," that "this place is a zoo," they are not technically speaking in the pejorative. And "grandsons" may not understand what happened "Last 'Nite," but that - to ape Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Lester Bangs - is what makes it fun.

PS - you should find the bootleg copy of "New York City Cops," a song they often play live which states the titular subject is simply, "not very smart." It's so stupidly subversive . . . I saw them play it live and it was a highlight.

Best Song: "Hard to Explain"

9. Josh Ritter, THE ANIMAL YEARS

Josh Ritter falls uncomfortably into a category of singer-songwriters who lack his ambition or experimentation with lyrics. First, let's forgive him for being named "Josh" - and not "Bob" or "Bruce" and recognize that on his signature he channels them both without aping either. And that he seamlessly enters references to Laurel and Hardy that make those two black and white goofs a haunting allusion. The lack of pretension in Ritter is what makes him endure, he churns out effortlessly lines like "the keys to the kingdom gets lost inside the kingdom" (Bob) and "Packs of dogs and cigarettes For those who ain¹t done packing yet" (Bruce)

"Lillian Egypt," "Girl in the War," "Here at the Right Time," and "Good Man" are a fine introduction to Ritter's work, but many might be put off by the gravitas and poetry of the second to last song, "Thin Blue Flame."

"I became a thin blue flame" begins a song full of endless ambiguity that never gets unraveled. It's sublime - both wonderful and terrible, full of clouds, clowns, and God - if he's up there - "in a cold dark room." Questions are being asked without being phrased as questions, and Ritter lets the modernist imagery take over along the way with a relatively simple sound. It gets louder, then softer, then louder - Springsteen's Nebraska mixed with Dylan's imagery without, and I have to emphasize this, stealing from either. Were it an actual poem, it probably wouldn't be published in the NEW YORKER, but its great stuff nonetheless, reaching transcendence through some pretty weird passageways - unlike some of these guys, Ritter doesn't sound like he's too enamored with his college creative writing class.

"The straight of the highway and the scattered out hearts They were coming together they pulling apart And angels everywhere were in my midst In the ones that I loved in the ones that I kissed I wondered what it was I'd been looking for up above Heaven is so big there ain¹t no need to look up So I stopped looking for royal cities in the air Only a full house gonna have a prayer"

Ritter's next album, THE HISTORICAL CONQUEST OF JOSH RITTER, was something of a letdown, but I know people who love it (update: I listened to it again and enjoyed it more). But this album nears perfection in a way that a guy this new to the world shouldn't be able to.

Best Song: Thin Blue Flame

8. Destroyer, DESTROYERS RUBIES

Yes, Dan Bejar is a troubadour - that's not a back-handed compliment. His lyrics are dense, vaguely melodic, full of wild abstractions and lines that seem lifted out of Finnegan's Wake. It isn't, obviously, for everyone; the songs Bejar sings are usually the weirdest on any of the New Pornographers albums, and occasionally the most awesome (as on Challengers). And Bejar has a cult like no other - the scarily exhaustive Destroyer Wiki takes some of the mystery out of what should be endlessly complex: telling us, for instance, that the lines "typical me, typical me" in track one ("Rubies") are ripped from a Smiths song. In fact, the Wiki records about six references to iconic bands or singers in "Rubies" alone.

But no matter what you can tease out of a typical Destroyer song, what remains magical is what you cannot. And it's wild poetry, indeed - carried along by an epic sense of place and mood. Each song on "Rubies" captures the feeling that Bejar strives for on all of his albums, as Andy Battaglia writes from the AV Club, "a literary exercise in just how far songs can stretch to make sense of the words within them."

Bejar teases us by making the songs sound so DAMN meaningful - each one capturing a memory that we'll never be able to decipher, so we have live in the moment he captures musically. But his images, while approaching some kind of redundant imagism for its own sake, always reflect rather than deflect his creative urge, his desire to do something that no one else is doing. And it that, he is wildly successful.

Best Song: "Your Blues"

7. Radiohead, KID A

There is nothing else to be said about this album. I agree with all the praise it gets. It did what few similar projects did: built on an agreed-upon masterpiece with something new and equally celebrated. KID A did all the things we expected of Radiohead, while doing them in ways that none of us imagined they would. My narrative with Radiohead, unlike most, begins with KID A - it was the album I understood all the rest of them through: the earlier poppier sound of THE BENDS and the grand achievement of OK COMPUTER, followed by the dissonant dissent of HAIL TO THE THIEF. That its B-Sides, as of yet unloved by me, make many top 50 lists is an understatement to the creative capital this band possessed in the early ots.

I confuse a lot of people with my insistence that VANILLA SKY is a wonderful, albeit extremely flawed, movie and it was hearing "Everything In Its Right Place" as Tom Cruise drives through an unoccupied New York that only exists in his dreams, that made me give KID A another listen; I got it. So did everyone else. Thanks Cameron Crowe.

Best Song: "Everything In Its Right Place"

6. Wilco, YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT

Another album that really doesn't need much revisiting from me, but I'll reflect on a few songs.

"Heavy Metal Drummer" is one of the songs that makes me happier about music, and the opening lines, "I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands I used to go see in the landing in the summer" could begin a novel. It hints at a memory at once lucid and elusive: there's a girl who loved those drummers, and there's innocence that paints the landing and the music that happened there as an impossible paradise: that is EXACTLY the way we reminisce about our teenage years: that Wilco goes for the shameless romanticism of this song is why so many people love them, I think, and it's the harbinger of their last two albums, each of which have taken this wistful moment and elaborated on it. And fittingly enough, there is some pretty superlative drumwork.

But there's also the deep, simple longing of "Poor Places" ("I really want to see you tonight"), the coded dissent of "War on War," and the giddy euphoria of "I've the Man Who Loves You." I'm always struck by how the bizarre lyrics of "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" gradually become more cohesive, how it moves from the surreal nonsense of an "American Aquarium Drinker" to "What I was thinking when I let you back in."

The story behind this album is more momentous than the album itself, but the drama behind its production and release, and the way it seemed to be a mirror for every artist/"the man" dichotomy that ever played out, tends to be unnecessary background noise for the album itself. That's unfortunate, yet necessary. Too many people have seen I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART and saw the band at their most griping (which, all things considered, was handled with considerable maturity). Jeff Bennett's recent death was an unhappy ending to that narrative, but it should not challenge the best album they've ever made.

Best Song: "Poor Places"

TOP 5 TO COME (Individually wrapped)

| By Andytown | 2:37 PM | Comments (0)

December 27, 2009

BEST ALBUMS OF THE DECADE 20-11

20. Sigur Ros, ( )

I would say something witty like "these guys would be like the Beatles and there would be an Icelandic invasion if we could pronounce their names," but that would be stupid. I don't possess the music vocabulary to write about what's going on in their songs, and I don't speak Icelandic, so only the Wikipedia can help me know, for instance, that their name means "White Rose" and that one of their members goes by "Goggi."

But every Sigur Ros album is singularly stunning in a way that enhances the last and anticipates the next. This is typically strong stuff, perhaps not as resonant or revelatory as 1999's AGAETIS BYRUM, and a bit more dissonant, but it's an album you can both admire and like. I found myself, during a bleak February (the worst month for high school teachers), rotating between AGAETIS, ( ), and TAKK constantly. I have trouble distinguishing them, but I rarely was disappointed when it was time for a specific album to come up. And that's all I can say about it.

Best Song: I dunno . . . they all blend together; here's one.

19. Peter, Bjorn, and John, WRITERS BLOCK

WRITERS BLOCK is a departure for an electro-heavy band I don't listen otherwise - a warm, goofy, infectious compilation. Songs from it are always in my top 25 most listened on Itunes, particularly the much-mixed most popular track "Old Folks" but also the haunting last tracks "Roll The Credits" and "Old Cow." There isn't a bad song on this album, which is full of interesting sounds. There's an interesting narrative here that I've never made time to follow, something that wavers between joyous reflection and post-relationship malaise, which makes any of these songs a proof-text for whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment.

Best Song: Objects of my Affection

18. British Sea Power, THE DECLINE OF BRITISH SEA POWER

I won't praise this justly praised, very loud, very energetic effort from this curiously named non-naval force. Ultimately, I prefer a BSP mix from their three albums (DECLINE, OPEN SEASON, DO YOU LIKE ROCK MUSIC?), but their first is their signature and features all their best qualities: it always seems like they're a poor-man's someband or another, but they always end up impressing me with their ability to bring together disparate elements. BSP came along in the middle of the "weird guys wearing weird costumes being weird in concert" phase, and it wasn't as original as the Flaming Lips, who were popping out of pods and dressed as rabbits. So they always seem to be hanging on someone else's coattails.

But here's the thing: there is NO bad song on this album, and only about two or three aren't achingly awesome. "Lately" could be expanded into a symphony, and at 14 minutes, its one of the few songs that long that I would call too short. It blends dissonance and the clear talents of everyone in the band into questions about what it really means to make music, and does it while proudly displaying the same absurdity as other songs. If there's one thing I could do to this album, it's this - end the album with the charming, should-be-radio-hit "Blackout;" as it is, it's disjointed to hear this pretty piece of pop next to the epic "Lately." But even if its parts don't always come together, they're pretty amazing to see in pieces.

Best Song: Blackout

17. Spiritualized, SONGS IN A&E

I'll just quote what I said last year when I picked it as my favorite album of year: "Jason Pierce has already created a cult that, on a microcosm scale, Morrisey might be jealous of. Spacemen 3 are godfathers of about five different genres, and Spiritualized emerges to remind everyone they exist every so often. Pierce resists the cult by disappearing into other projects, but Spiritualized offers him the front-man job he sometimes resists, but clearly deserves.
LADIES AND GENTLEMAN WE ARE FLOATING IN SPACE may remain the defining Spiritualized album, and with good reason, but SONGS IN A&E is clearly his most personal work. Written during or after the long stint Pierce spent in the Accident and Emergency Ward because of respiratory failure (hence A&E), these SONGS form an at-times magical concept album about the cruel divide between passionate and unrequited love. Pierce competently works in a variety of noises (church bells, computer sounds) that enhance rather than distract, and the harmonies form touching chapters in between the songs that wear the influences of Pierce's friends and idols in every second (Springsteen, Daniel Johnston).
Critics raved about SONGS when it came out, but it's been noticeably absent on the year end best lists. But in a year when bands repeated themselves to good effect, I'm going with the ambitious power-drive of A&E as the best of the year."
Best Song: Soul on Fire

16. Spoon, GA GA GA GA GA GA

An album that I find myself listening to constantly - I'll argue with anyone that this is the best one they've ever put out. It captures their gift for the lost art of the three minute pop song - even the one that goes nearly five minutes feels like a short but perfect moment. The opening beats of "Don't Make a Target" are rhythmic in a way that anticipates the later songs, but there's something lonely and desolate even among the energy - like coming into the middle of a party. "The Ghost of You Lingers" is about as deep as they get: a lot of surface fears articulated with the utmost gravitas, ultimately making a lot of simple yet clear points about losing people and trying to forget them. We'll never know if that's the appropriate way to listen to this song, or this album, or if its just the meaningless words that accompany the experimental bombast, but it works.

Best Song: "The Underdog"

15. Sufjan Stevens, ILLINOIS

The grand mission that hasn't been fulfilled: Suf's plan to make an album about all fifty states. So far, he's 48 short, and in the years since his stunning breakthrough outside more esoteric circles, he's only put out a superlative B-sides albums, yearly awesome and unironic Christmas records, and some quirky side-projects. ILLINOIS remains as the harbinger of a follow-up that never was, and the ensuing response . . . perhaps that's why it never happened.

In "Chicago," the most oft-played of the bunch, Sufjan sings, "I fell in love with a place, in my mind, in my mind," and its that passion that carries the whole album - a sympathy matched with a completely unique quirkiness that drew so many fans to this weird, infectious concept piece. "John Wayne Gacy" does not hide its curiosity behinds layers of self-reference; it's the kind of story that has to be told if you want to understand a place, whether in your mind or elsewhere. Sufjan's commitment to this place is why I'm disappointed he hasn't continued to explore other significant places.

ILLINOIS still finds new fans, and I imagine that it will resonate with younger audiences (for good reasons) more than any other album of this decade.

Best Song: "They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From The Dead!! Ahhhh!"

14. Beck, SEA CHANGE

My favorite Beck album is his most significant departure; it's often debated among Beck fans, as it signals a move away from the experimental goofball that everyone fell in love with. As he oscillates between those two personalities, I hardly prefer one to the other, but am glad that such a talented human being is willing to explore both sounds. We could see the Beck of "Mutations" or "Odelay" taking a title like "Guess I'm Doing Fine" as his latest collage of fascinating sounds, but it's actually a pretty accurate way of the way this album feels. "Paper Tiger" is gloomy and eerily deprecating while the optimism of "Sunday Sun" gets lost in everything that's going on around it; who ever thought Beck would be compared to Nick Drake? But that's the mood that occurs here.

Beck had a good decade, but his star has neither risen nor fallen; an album like SEA CHANGE isn't likely to open him up to more audiences, but it further endeared to an artist I liked, and made me like him more.

Best Song: "Paper Tiger"

13. AC Newman, GET GUILTY

Were I to make a "Best of 2009" list, it would be short. I didn't freak out quite as much about any of the albums that most people loved - Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Phoenix, The Dirty Projectors - and the only two that I find myself repeatedly listening to were by members of the New Pornographers - Neko Case's MIDDLE CYCLONE and A.C. Newman's awesome and mostly-unheard of GET GUILTY. It's a grand album, from its opening licks that tells you exactly what you're going to get: Newman's inimitable ability to create diverse harmonies bound by a common mood and energy.

On the opening line of the opening track, Newman sings, "There are about ten or twelve things that I can teach you; make of that what you will." When he gets to the last one, he's telling us, "You have to got to be . . . ****ing kidding me." That's what we're dealing with here - the dance floor rhythms of "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer" and the dour indecipherability of "Young Atlantis." Newman rocks this sucker out; I can listen to every one of these songs at any moment of my day. To describe it would be ridiculous, so I won't, but continue to endorse it so that Newman finds new fans.

Best Song: All My Days and All My Days Off

12. Bishop Allen, CHARM SCHOOL

My love for Bishop Allen and their debut album is linked to my discovery of mumblecore. MUTUAL APPRECIATION - which will show up on my fave films of the decade - starred B.A. frontman Justin Rice, a bespectacled doofus with a good attitude. "Things are what you make of them," he tells us, on a song that got me through a tough period of my life, or "Ghosts are good company." He does a weird remix of "Eve of Destruction" that shows his gifts for entering stories In Media Res. And "Bishop Allen Drive" is achingly romantic without being about romance. These guys have a gift for picking stellar back-up singers, like the luminous Kate Dollenmayer, mumblecore star of FUNNY HAHA.

The album itself features an ambitious array of allusion and anachronism (and alliteration!), which makes them seem Decemberist-lite, though Charm School came out before the Dec.s breakthrough, PICARESQUE. It features an interesting sampling of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" that takes that title and applies it more universally, drawing out the alluring melody of the original while sacrificing the dated draft-card burning doom and gloom. And "Things Are What You Make Of Them" should become a mantra, particularly its closing verse: "and you know what I mean; yeah you know what I mean." But it never became a hipster rallying cry, even as its taken on a lot of significance with me.

CHARM SCHOOL may ultimately be too twee for those who got really excited about Animal Collective or, for that matter, Nirvana. It's an album and a band that doesn't seem interested in any of the bigger issues, and yet their poppy roots still sound experimental; that's probably why, outside of "Click Click Click" (from 2nd album THE BROKEN STRING, and the soundtrack to a camera commercial), they've yet to show up anywhere except the random Independent movie soundtrack. But this an affecting and effective album, an album whose surprising mix of whimsy and melancholy acted as the soundtrack for a turbulent moment I wanted to end, yet remains as residue for what I think I like about the things that I like. And you know what I mean. Yeah, you know what I mean.

Best Song: Things Are What You Make of Them (this is an interesting version, different from the album, that was used for the craptastical farce "Saved," and inexplicably is scoring a bunch of highlights from HALO - I guess b/c he repeats the word "Halo or Hello")

11. Pedro The Lion, CONTROL

My introduction to Pedro still stands as my sentimental favorite, and no amount of David Bazan's neuroses is going to make me dislike this album. Bazan made his name as a darling of the Christian rock crowd, but CONTROL signals the break (I think) from the early PG-rated stuff to the ironic and angry energy of CONTROL. At first adamant about his faith, Bazan has since been elusive, and the results have been surprising. CONTROL marks the last good work he's done, and I'll argue that with anyone (though ACHILLES HEEL, the last official Pedro the Lion, has its moments).

On control, Bazan's anger often takes the form of an overwhelming frustration, put to music and given exclamation by his wit - in Bazan's ruminations about sex, capitalism, childhood, and some of the big questions, there's always the welcome aspect that he doesn't understand any of them, and that makes his commentary less incisive, more personal.

Bazan sometimes reminds me of the Simpsons episode where Krusty the Klown becomes a rage-fueled stand-up comic, and that makes his sometimes-audience, me among them, the Homer Simpson who shouts out things like "Don't you hate pants?" We want Bazan to articulate our frustrations, and he used to do it as well as anyone - without preaching to us, where the anger on the surface collides with the intellect and curiosity beneath it.

Best Song: Indian Summer; which isn't available, so here's the equally good Magazine

| By Andytown | 2:25 PM | Comments (1)

December 16, 2009

ORSON WELLES AND MR. FOX

We had better go ahead and get used to Zac Efron being a big star. And why shouldn't he be? Unlike Shia Labeouf, he doesn't coast on being a mildly witty, kind of goofy-looking star of action movies. Efron is damn talented: he can sing, dance, and he's got the kind of matinee idol looks that transcend time: only the 70s would have been unkind to him, grouping him in with George Hamilton and all the Robert Redford wannabes who were shut out when the industry was looking for the next Dustin Hoffman.

Efron is better than inoffensive, worse than great in Richard Linklater's gloriously entertaining new film ME AND ORSON WELLES. He sings, smiles, and has a kind-of whiz-bang clean-cuttedness that hides his intentions always on the sly. But he and the always-boring Claire Danes are merely scenery for the best performance of the year from Christian McKay.

I know nothing about McKay; neither do you. Check out his IMDB profile - not even a supporting role on LAW AND ORDER. But he looks the part and gives it the necessary gusto. Welles is a force of nature, a boy genius who walks into the room with false humility only to vehemently prove he's smarter than everyone else. He's a master of two mediums (theater and radio), and the film closes as he sets his eyes on another (film). McKay dominates every scene he's in, and Linklater shoots him appropriately - the camera follows him, or the camera centers on him even as others are more pertinent to the context of the shot: it's as though Welles the character is implicitly directing the scene.

There's a rogue's gallery of long-forgotten actors and personalities, lovingly embodied on the surface without any unnecessary depth by Linklater: Norman Lloyd (later to become famous by falling off the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock's Saboteur) is a ham; George Colouris (a Welles regular) is an arrogant neurotic; Joseph Cotten (who had a great run in the 40s) is a slick ladies man with a good heart. And there are dames, divas, and Guffman-esque critics to boot. But the movie belongs to McKay, and it's to Efron's credit that he lets him have it. The romantic intrigue plot is not what you'll come away talking about, but it doesn't make it a worse film: it allows us to see Welles in all his bluster and bravado. In that sense, it's a nice conceit.

Linklater is an interesting cat. DAZED AND CONFUSED is one of my favorite movies, but I'm only fond of a few of his others: not really big on the SUNRISE flicks (mumblecore does that so much better), thought SCHOOL OF ROCK was overrated, and FAST FOOD NATION an interesting misfire. But SLACKER (which spawned mumblecore, I get it), DAZED, WAKING LIFE, and A SCANNER DARKLY make a fascinating aimless canon: dreamy flicks about people wandering around and trying to figure out what it's all about without ever really getting there. I never would have thought he would have been up to the task of a period piece, particularly since he muffed THE NEWTON BOYS, but the result is an unfussy, energetic portrayal of a period and a scene. The final set-piece - Welles' contemporary revisioning of JULIUS CAESAR featuring fascists and a Mussolini-like Caesar - is accurately realized without ever calling attention to its own artifice.

So I'm happy to give one glowing recommendation (see it!); here's another. Surprise! I like Wes Anderson's latest movie - THE FANTASTIC MR. FOX. It's his funniest movie since BOTTLE ROCKET, and its charming without the rough edges of some of Anderson's best characters. Mr. Fox reminds me of the lovechild of Dignan and Royal Tenenbaum - he has the former's good nature and the latter's need to control things.

I've always thought a pretty typical, unheralded moment in Anderson's filmography is when Royal meets Chaz's kids at the playground. He sees their dog Buckley, and says, "Sit Buckley." Anderson always thrives on characters who like to plan events that might fail magnificently, who try to control that which utterly evades them: Dignan's cold-storage heist, Max Fischer's aquarium, Chaz's protection of his children, Francis' trip through India, Zissou's hunt for the Tiger Shark. Mr. Fox is no different, and that's probably what drew Anderson to Roald Dahl's lovely little book.

There's a joyful subversive sense of the radical here: Mr. Fox is stickin' it to the man and still unabashedly a hero. He's a fox who rejects no one - the animal kingdom has never seemed more democratic and communal. Even an evil rat has a poignant moment. And the father/son stuff, always more complex than it seems in Anderson, is just a nicely wrought here as it has been before.

But mostly this movie is funny. Every backdrop, song cue, and anthropomorphic personality is lovingly conceived; my personal favorite is Owen Wilson as a passive but brutally sincere polar bear coaching a sport too ridiculous to be described (it involves long division, and lighting a pine cone). And the constant digging is like something out of DIG DUG.

- My friend Jake wrote a much better review of ME AND ORSON WELLES on his blog - check it out.

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2009/12/portrait-of-welles-as-young-man.html

| By Andytown | 10:56 PM | Comments (1)

December 6, 2009

SATURDAY NIGHT NOT-ALIVE

Last night's Saturday Night Live was unusually funny - that's a back-handed compliment for a comedy show. Comedy shows should be funny, and SNL hasn't been. Its Obama imitations grasp none of the nuances of the character to exploit for humor, so what we're left with is a caricature with no comedic potential. Fred Armisen does a fine imitation, impressive really, but it isn't funny. The digital shorts have been lame, and lack the energy of the live format. Its best performers - Forte, Sudeikis, Hader - have been underutilized so that the more manic, slapstick personalities like Wiig and Thompson can take the stage and shout, scream, dance, and make wacky voices. (Also, Andy Samberg has his moments, and he's clearly the breakout star, but his Swedish Chef was waaaay off; he didn't even attempt to do the accent!)

But last night, perhaps because the guest lacked the talent to carry any of the sketches, Sudeikis, Hader, and Forte were showcased. Also Bobby Moynihan, who is clearly pretty gifted, and the two newcomers who I can't tell apart. The best skit was the last one featuring Forte and Sudeikis - a glorious piece with layers and layers of absurdity and allusion about a man inexplicably dressed as Colonel Sanders applying for a job as an Astronaut who steals a potato chip. At its best moments (before it devolves into gross-out humor), this skits recalls MR. SHOW with its singularly driven vision and attitude of "I don't care if you think its funny, this is what we're doing." I also find it hilarious that they keep referring to the purloined snack as a "Potato Chip."

These three guys have proven their comedic skills off the SNL stage - Sudeikis in 30 ROCK, Forte in FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS and some Bob Oedenkirk projects, and Hader in SUPERBAD and ADVENTURELAND (Hader needs one more solid supporting role in a hit movie to start thinking about being that Will Ferrell type, but it looks like that mantle will be assumed by Samberg, who is not nearly as gifted or funny). Along with Armisen, they need to be the ones carrying the show. Forte's clueless sports announcer is a perfect showcase for his quirky and inventive talents; a few years ago, they had him playing G.W. Bush, which shows how wrong the show tends to get it.

But sadly, there seems to be some strange ultimatum about promoting the hell out of Kenan Thompson. Since I've had DVR, and don't have to watch it live, I've watched SNL for the last four years - it's been mostly unrewarding, but I have grown to love Hader and sometimes fast forward to his bits. Thompson often dresses in drag and always hams it up. The results are unrewarding: he's a professional but he's rarely funny. Most of the time he plays a hysterical black person who dominates the scene. It's rarely funny, and it's sometimes vaguely racist - particularly because he's the only black actor on the show. So they often play him against someone who is not black, but is pretending to be.

It is the failure of the show to cast some other funny people of diverse ethnicities. They have got to be out there, but when the show peaked, they always had a Tim Meadows or Chris Rock or Garrett Morris or (best case scenario) Eddie Murphy. When Maya Rudolph has to guest star as Oprah, that's a problem, and when the only vaguely Hispanic-looking Armisen has to play Obama . . . another problem. But SNL continues to round out their cast with white hipsters who are good at playing white hipsters. And to remedy this, they rely on the not-so-talented Thompson. This myopic casting vision has haunted SNL since Tim Meadows left, and I find caricatures like the one where Thompson plays a large black woman who tries to trade sex for a dress repulsive. It plays on the worst stereotypes, doesn't comment ironically on them, and ultimately is grotesque and offensive.

Even after the millennium, SNL continues to be a star-making factory: Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are both doing great work; Will Ferrell is still a mega-star even after a few box-office flops; Samberg has clearly broken out and Hader and Wiig are about to. But the show needs to dedicate itself to something it only rarely does: being a venue for people other than funny white people (Murphy and Rock being the obvious exceptions). When the only black actor they have is mainly a vehicle for making fun of black people, that's a problem.

I don't know what to make of Seth Meyers. When he was a full-time cast member, he was awful: terrible at imitations and bad at anything else other than playing a straight man (when he would occasionally lapse into laughter, unlike Sudeikis who nails the above scene). It would be reductive and fallacious to blame him for the bad scenes and others for the good; for all I know, but someone had to green-light the "disgusting, imbecilic black woman shopping" sketch, and I can't think Meyers was surprised to see it. Someone is deciding to showcase Thompson and Wiig over the three guys I've mentioned; and they dropped Casey Wilson, who was (in my opinion) funnier than Wiig because she didn't mug so much.

Why do I keep watching? Because it's easy and I can fast forward through the commercials. Often I've stopped watching before Weekend Update. But the show should develop into the new millennium, because I think it's lost its hipster audience, and needs to acknowledge that.

(Maybe I'm too hard on Wiig, but all of her characters seem to be a thirty second joke stretched out into five minutes. It's obvious she's a talented comedienne, but most of what she does relies on mugging, shouting, and portraying only slightly divergent versions of menopausal women. She's got potential)

| By Andytown | 1:28 PM | Comments (0)