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May 18, 2007
FIVE THOUGHTS
1. I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed DREAMGIRLS. I rented it mainly so I could dismiss its supposedly shameless hype, pop Divas, and caked-on-like-makeup glitz. The hype may have sunk the Dreamworks Oscar Boat, but the film itself is entertaining, fast-paced, captures the period without fuss or annoying hyperrealism and is full of great performances. About the only thing that didn't grab me, and that keeps it from being my favorite music of the last 40 years, was the music. There really are no memorable songs, just a lot of inferior Supremes knockoffs. But once you get past the fiction of the Dreamgirls' brilliance (a foundation that's easier to accept than the supposed hilarity of the show-in-show of STUDIO 60 ON THE SUNSET STRIP), director Bill Condon whisks things along nicely and we get a really compelling mix of character, the melodramatic machinations of the music industry, and the mythical backstories of superstars.
Everyone seemed ready to tell Jennifer Hudson to take her Oscar and go home, and at the time I was a little piffed that neither of the intense performances from BABEL beat the odds. But Hudson is a powerhouse - her big number is full of the kind of gut-wrenching bombast that something like MOULIN ROUGE tended to post-modernize, to suggest couldn't exist within any of the roosts of the current slackercynic-ruled audiences. Her character is tragic, big, and endearing, and the book and director are smart enough not to muddy things up too much by straying too far from the archetype. A movie like DREAMGIRLS is about giving the audience what they want, and it succeeds wildly. It certain did not deserve the snarky commentary from the back row audience that didn't even bother to show up.
2. On the other hand, PANS LABYRINTH did not strike me as a magical fairy tale that mixed fantasy with history and showed the interworkings between imagination and reality, but rather as a brutal, often masochistic episode of endurance and suffering. The fairy tale portion is dark, obstinately lacking in narrative drive (which is typical of a film with PAN's ambitions, but not for the classic fairy tales that the main characters loves, which operate on a dream logic that's implausibly compelling), and overtly allegorical. Obviously, enough people are clammering about its greatness that it can't be a failure, but I think it fails in becoming too much of a parable about belief, and a grim document about the evils of fascism, instead of a mystical tale of restoration and unusual heroism. The larger portion of the film focuses not on the precocious, endangered girl, but (distressingly) instead of her vile monster of a stepfather. I had heard in past reviews that Del Toro tries to "humanize" him, but he is an authoritative villain straight out of a Penny Dreadful, only complex in the creativity of his cruelty. I cringed through most of the movie: an entirely unpleasant experience. It is definitely not a movie I want to see again.
2.5 On the note of fairy tales, my eighth grade class put on a very "Shrekish" production for the lower school at Westminster. It went welll I'm proud of them. Three girls in the class actually wrote the thing, and while it primarily consisted of eighth grade humor (Sample Scene Direction: "Rapunzel breaks a nail and faints") and a heavy reliance on anachronism (Our Prince Charming delivered a rap that concluded with the line "Squeeze the Charmin' yall") and cheap props (the "Magic Mirror" was just "a guy holding a picture frame over his face, the play seemed to be enjoyed by all.
3. So the two best albums of the year are Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's SOME LOUD THUNDER and Arcade Fire's NEON BIBLE. At this point, saying that Wilco's SKY BLUE SKY belongs up there too seems contrarian, as the entire butthead music community is currently involved in a bout of fascist schoolmarmishness about how we should we perceived their latest effort. It's very clear that rather than try to please the culturati who had already conceived the stages of his career, Jeff Tweedy decided to a solid album with at least six laid-back, awesome songs.
I suppose the problem is that a lot of those folks in the back row decided to define Tweedy after YANKEE HOTEL FOXTROT: not just the album, but the inside-the-music storybook that transpired and gets exaggerated like a game of telephone. With YHF, the unpretentious, spotlight-eluding Tweedy jumped into an arena where everyone to decided to take ownership over his career and his supposed responsibility to the wicked-awesome monster he had created. And now that Tweedy has proved incapable of being categorized (and, unlike even a lot of great acts, including the two I just mentioned, doesn't WANT to be categorized), and this seems to piss a lot of the categorizers off. The result: a bad review of an otherwise great album.
4. I'm not a contrarian when I say I've given up on the NBA; rather, I'm joining a diverse, boundary-exploding camp who want to send David Stern to manage a Family Dollar store (badly). The Suns/Spurs debacle has ruined any chance of the NBA being at all watchable as June rolls around, and it is all a result of the league allowing rogues like Bruce Bowen to pull their cheap shots without any "Stern" consequence. If you read ESPN Page 2, you're not hearing anything new. Phoenix got screwed, and the ironic, kind of satisfying result is that the NBA will suffer through its lowest rated finals in years. There's enough bad hoodoo going around to turn off the casual fans, like me. Unless Lebron James can will the mediocre, ugly Cavs past the Pistons, we will have a repeat of the unwatchable Pistons-Spurs series from two years back.
I argue that I am the fan the NBA needs right now, and they are doing everything they can to make me hate them. Local fans will remain local fans, but the NBA has to have a core who don't go to the games, but passionately enjoy the most exciting players. I like having sports to care about in June - in short, I want to like the league, and they keep finding ways to disgust me. The Finals will more than likely showcase none of them, because the officiating is geared toward mechanical teams like the Spurs and Pistons that strongarm their way to success by skirting the line on every rule the NBA has.
5. So, yes, I've turned tail and made a triumphant return to blogging. Gone are the days of the awkward Blogger format. I'm a Wordpress guy, gang, and I'm representin' the hometown in the URL. I hope I'll be more consistent than my past efforts, but here they are if you wont them.
thegash.blogspot.com
Welcome back to Andytown! Come for the seasonal blintzes and (occasionally) temperate weather; stay for the blog.
| By Andytown | 10:14 PM
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Comments
I have also enjoyed the new albums by Feist, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Posted by: Ben at May 19, 2007 05:14 PM
Playoffs without Nash is like Lucky Charms without the marshmallows.
Wilco is underappreciated. Jeff Tweedy is an emotional treat for a world deaf to simple suffering veiled behind a tapestry of denim and disaster.
So it goes.
Posted by: Sarah Beth at May 20, 2007 07:37 AM
Wilco is over appreciated. Jeff Tweedy is an egomaniac who has hijacked a decent group of musicians and used them as a platform to gloat about how much he hates all the women who loved him. If the world is deaf it's because we're still clearing out all the mine fields and mass burial pits.
Get a real job.
Posted by: Ben Roberts at May 21, 2007 04:49 PM