35 Shots of Rum (2008)

35 rhums, France / Germany, 100 minutes

Director: Claire Denis

Writers: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau

Photography: Agnes Godard

Music: Tindersticks

Editor: Guy Lecorne

Cast: Alex Descas, Mati Diop, Nicole Dogue, Gregoire Colin, Julieth Mars Toussaint, Adele Ado, Jean-Christophe Folly

I’ve seen a handful or so of pictures by director and cowriter Claire Denis and have to admit they often leave me mystified. That is notably the case with Beau Travail, a much-acclaimed picture I see turning up on all kinds of best-ever lists, though it left me cold. For all its allusive beauty it is ultimately a French Foreign Legion picture with most of the cliches intact, just more gritty and beautiful. Trouble Every Day was an oddly unpleasant vampire show that did not live up to advance billing. On the other hand, I love White Material and its examination of postcolonial Africa, playing it like tense horror. 35 Shots of Rum, by contrast to all the foregoing (she gets around), is set in suburban Paris and far more domestic and meditative, observing bonds of a fractured family and work group and apartment building community as things inevitably shift and change. Time, life, all that.

Lionel (Alex Descas) is a widower in his 50s who works the commuter trains, riding the complexities of the rail lines which we see in hypnotic shots from his view, tangling and disentangling. He lives with his grown daughter, Josephine (Mati Diop), who has an advanced degree in anthropology. It’s unclear when or how her mother, his wife, died but it feels like it’s many years in the past. They still feel her loss, as a road trip to visit her grave late in the picture shows. Gabrielle (Nicole Dogue) is a neighbor who drives a cab for a living. She and Lionel have a history and she still has feelings for him, and motherly feelings for Josephine too. Tensions exist between them, but a good deal of sincere affection too. Rounding out the main four in 35 Shots is the brooding, somewhat standoffish and self-mysterious young man Noe (Gregoire Colin), who also lives in the building.

“The Delicate” (1994)

[spoilers] Here’s what Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, editors of the anthology The Weird, have to say about this story by Jeffrey Ford: “Although his fiction comes at the weird sideways, some of his stories, like ‘The Delicate’ (1994), enter the weird with complete abandon. It’s a short, sharp shock of the grotesque.” It is definitely short, only three pages, a riffing free-form assault by some life form called “The Delicate” (which, by the way, appears to have nothing to do with any Michelle Shocked album). The description is compressed and vividly effective, which at least is more than you get from various masters of the weird. “He comes in the latter days of afternoon, through blowing snow, dressed in black, while Schubert’s ‘Eighth’ plays magically in the background.” I like the Schubert detail, but come on. Still, I have to admit there is something inspired in this brief screed. Ford’s imagination is on fire and his voice mostly in control. It could be a vampire, this Delicate. Blood-sucking seems to be involved. The woman he “ingests,” however, has something in her—perhaps taken deliberately?—that turns him into a dog. This all happens in a place called Absentia. Next comes Pharsalus, the hunter, “in from the wilderness.” Absentia sounds like the last outpost of civilization before the North Pole. Pharsalus adopts the dog that used to be or still is the Delicate. Demons are a danger in the wilderness. Winter seems to be called Night and spring Morning. We spend relatively a lot of time with Pharsalus. The Delicate becomes a human-like dog and fights with Pharsalus, who loses and dies but wounds the Delicate, who is soon on a rampage, ingesting townspeople two at a time. I’m enjoying the story more rereading it slowly and somewhat reassembling it here. The army is sent in to get him. What army? Unclear. It all feels Roman to me in a way. “They collect the creature into a plastic bag and freeze-dry him. His remains are taken to Spire City in the Sunbelt where they are stored for the edification of future generations. The funding never comes through to study the crumbs of the Delicate, so he lies in a bag on a shelf and waits.” That’s how it ends. A wild ride but doesn’t add up to much more than that last image maybe.

Jeffrey Ford, The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant: And Other Stories
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Paloma Faith, “Crybaby” (2017)

[listen up!]

Paloma Faith’s first single from her fourth album kept reminding me of “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy & Monica, which I see (hear) from a side-by-side listen is about the arpeggiated figure (if I’ve got the term right) played on what sounds like a harp, or maybe some keyboard—glistening, spidery, quite lovely. Listening more closely, I must admit I found the misspelling of the title setting off frustrated copy editor peeves. It should be and by the usage it is “Cry, Baby,” with or without a comma (author’s choice). I looked up a “lyrics video” to clarify, and things got more confusing as I found it given there as “Oh go on and cry baby, crybaby,” as if the singer is encouraging the display of emotion but also mocking the tearfulness and the crier. But that doesn’t fit with the tone of the song and I’m willing to call more misspellings on the part of the video too. The song, according to Wikipedia and it seems plausible enough because why not, is about toxic masculinity. Says Faith, it’s "a conversation between a man and I, and the song questions whether global conflicts would cease to exist if men successfully dealt with their feelings.” OK, whatever, I don’t hear it that way, but I see the point and it’s fair enough to call the whole thing a muddle. The main point is that it’s a catchy, beautiful, and endearing pop song with the harp figure going and Faith churning it out in full warm clarion voice. I think I’m on board with the general sentiments too but as I say that’s a little muddled. Who cares anyway? A message is not often the point of pop music.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Shirley Jackson’s last novel is often called a masterpiece and that’s fair enough, except I’m more inclined to think of Jackson as a short-story writer and “The Lottery” as her masterpiece. ISFDB relegates this short novel to “non-genre” and Wikipedia classifies it as a mystery. No one seems to know what to do with it, including me, though I have no objection to the masterpiece label. It’s about a family with many dark secrets. The darkest may be the one kept by Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, age 18, the first-person narrator. The Blackwoods have long been resented by the locals for being rich and aloof. A few years before the time of this story someone poisoned the entire family with arsenic in the sugar bowl. Only three survived: Merricat and her sister Constance, who didn’t take sugar with the berries that were served, and Uncle Julian, who barely survived the poisoning and is now disabled and in a wheelchair, with mild encroaching dementia. Merricat is the one most able to go into town twice a week for groceries, but she has to be careful or the townspeople will hassle her. I’m not going to give it away but it’s not hard to figure out who did the poisoning, which is readily revealed at about the beginning of the last third of the novel. Constance was charged with the crime but acquitted, leaving the Blackwoods more isolated and reviled than ever. One day their unpleasant cousin Charles shows up and makes an attempt to take over the family. He’s mostly interested in their money. Merricat can’t stand him and wants him to leave, but he intends to stay. Eventually the conflict leads to the house catching fire, destroying the upper floors. Firefighters—who also hate the Blackwoods—arrive to put out the blaze and the rest of the town shows up to watch and catcall. “Let it burn,” is their sentiment. After the fire is under control a riot breaks out. The townspeople enter the home and destroy everything in it that they can. The fire and the riot are amazing, vivid, painful scenes. The entire novel is suffused with intense tensions. In some ways it’s hard to know why We Have Always Lived in the Castle even exists, it is so full of hate and rage and pointless fury. But it’s also powerful and unforgettable—as good as any reasons to exist.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys (1965)

Around the time I was 11 I got a paper route and joined the Columbia Record Club for the usual deal: a dozen or so albums upfront for almost nothing and then an expensive commitment that never seemed to end (I had a round 2 in the CD era). The club did not have much to offer by way of the Beatles, my main interest, but I got the US version of the Hard Day’s Night soundtrack and an Alvin & the Chipmunks album of all Beatles covers. I also got albums by Cher, Jay & the Americans, Gene Pitney, Johnny Rivers, and more. Sometimes it wasn’t easy even picking out enough freebies. I would say now that the prize of the pack was Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, an album I voluntarily return to that still holds up and then some. But in 1966 I might have pointed to Gary Lewis & the Playboys. I got all three of their first albums (all released in 1965, all clocking in under 30 minutes each) and I listened to them quite a bit. The formula, hardly unique to this band, tended to be two or three hits and/or original songs otherwise matched, to get to the mandatory dozen, with rock ‘n’ roll covers of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: Chuck Berry, the Coasters, Bobby Darin, the Kinks, Bobby Rydell, the Searchers, Bobby Vee, so on so forth, giving me an oldies education foundation. And the originals, many of which became top 10 hits, were good: “This Diamond Ring” (cowritten by Al Kooper and intended originally for the Drifters), ”Count Me In,” “Everybody Loves a Clown” (written by Lewis, Leon Russell, and producer Snuff Garrett), “She’s Just My Style” (also written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett, with Al Capps), and “Sure Gonna Miss Her.”

The one exception now, the one big hit I have the hardest time calling good, is “Save Your Heart for Me,” a knockoff of the much better “See You in September.” “Save Your Heart” seems ultra-dippy to the max to me now, but the fact is it was one of the first three singles I ever bought (as I think I’ve noted elsewhere the other two on that momentous occasion were Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” and the Beatles’ “Help!” b/w “I’m Down”). Yes, liking “Save Your Heart for Me” that much embarrasses me now, though I also admit I don’t really mind hearing the song. And of course it also embarrasses me that I was so nutty for Gary Lewis & the Playboys in the first place, but honesty is the best policy around here. Here we have an example of the original “guilty pleasure” problem, though now the pleasure is chiefly nostalgic I suppose. My esteem did not have anything to do consciously with Gary’s famous father (which probably did have something to do with their big showbiz success). Jerry Lewis has never appealed to me much. In fairness, however, I should note I was also into superstar kid group Dino, Desi & Billy at the time (respectively, son of Dean Martin, son of Desi Arnaz, and neighbor kid), who had top 30 hits in 1965 with “I’m a Fool” and “Not the Lovin’ Kind.” It’s possible I was starstruck and don’t remember it that way. By all rights, I should have been embarrassed about any enterprise using the word “playboy” in 1965 but it’s perfectly possible that it was an appeal for me anyway and I have suppressed that memory.

In the ‘90s I picked up a Gary Lewis & the Playboys greatest-hits anthology on CD. They had more and better hits than I remembered, but still only maybe a third of that collection is worth revisiting. I haven’t been near the original albums in decades, an opportunity streaming has afforded me. So, right, I would not remotely call A Session With Gary Lewis & the Playboys—their second LP and the most successful by chart standards—a great album or even a particularly good one. But it’s not terrible. “Count Me In” is one of their best singles, “Without a Word of Warning” is a pretty good original (written by Lewis, Russell, and Garrett). “Little Miss Go-Go” is another original (written by Russell, Garrett, and Louis Yule Brown) but more of a blatant Beach Boys ripoff. “Voodoo Woman,” written by Bobby Goldsboro (!), is very silly but maybe, because it is so silly, the best example of a very silly theme that runs through whole swaths of rock. The covers include Ricky Nelson (“Travelin’ Man”), Everly Brothers (“Walk Right Back”), the Yardbirds (“For Your Love”), Freddy Cannon (“Palisades Park”), and Del Shannon (“Runaway”), five solid lessons in rock ‘n’ roll. They are nowhere near the originals, but if Gary Lewis & the Playboys were only a gateway to the greater glories, well, that will just have to do.

Kesha, “Praying” (2017)

[listen up!]

Curmudgeon incoming: my problems with the pop warbling mode started with Whitney Houston and accelerated in the new century with the coming of TV’s performance competition reality show American Idol, which prized vocal technique and histrionic stagecraft above melody and arrangement. It was deeply alienating for someone reared on the Beatles and Tommy James and, I firmly believe, it’s a misnomer to call it pop music. But by 2017 I was making or trying to make my accommodations and sufficiently softened by then that “Praying” could reach me. It was Kesha’s first single in something like four years. It starts exactly as what I don’t like, all full of its own faux humbleness, with churchy piano chords and Kesha sneaking in at low volume, low energy, laying the ground for the wall of emo to come. I don’t know Kesha’s other work well, but Wikipedia tells me this lead single from her third album can be taken as a departure (from her “dive bar party anthems,” per Vox’s Caroline Framke). Some even characterize “Praying” as a comeback. The high pitch of drama—even the idea that prayer is the recommended necessity for the situation at hand, whatever that somewhat murky situation is exactly—somehow wears down my innate objections, as the overwhelming attack kicks in and washes over me like redemption. When the drums come in full at about 2:25 the song is fully ablaze and roaring. Kesha says it is about forgiving our trespassers. Others hear the calls for forgiveness more as cold brushoff, the moral equivalent of saying “thank you with a capital F.” I mean: “I hope you find your peace / Falling on your knees.” Me, I just get lost in the sweltering gospel texture and hope it works out right for everyone involved. Pray for it, even.

The Sheep Detectives (2026)

The Sheep Detectives is rated PG for “thematic material, some violent content and brief language,” but I felt like I was watching something absolutely suitable for the entire family on a summer outing, perfect for the drive-in if you’ve still got one near you, with both jokes that are surprisingly funny and events that are surprisingly moving. And it’s packed with stars, both live and voice: Bryan Cranston, Hugh Jackman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Patrick Stewart, Emma Thompson, etc. Jackman plays George Hardy, a struggling sheep rancher who despises the town butcher. Every night he reads chapters from mystery novels to the flock, who bleat satisfaction in unison. They love story time. When humans aren’t around they speak English to one another, as funnee talking aminals are wont to do. They are a bunch of irresistible charming characters. Lily (Louis-Dreyfus) is an expert in mystery stories and usually sees developments coming before they get there. Sir Ritchfield (Stewart) is a pompous strutting ass who’s wrong about everything. Sebastian (Cranston) is a proud loner with a complicated background. Cloud (Regina Hall) extravagantly admires her own beauty and always thinks it’s the maid who committed the crime. There are more, all distinct, along with sheep acting like sheep and a whole thing about “winter lambs,” which they say are often rejected by the flock. Then, unexpectedly, Hardy turns up dead. At first police call it a heart attack but before long Lily and the sheep are on the case. The police investigation is led by Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun. Succession, The Perks of Being a Wallflower), who reminded me of Don Knotts. Basically the plot from that point is a takeoff on the Agatha Christie style, with a handful of suspects—including an obvious one who just as obviously won’t be the miscreant—and, eventually, a confrontation with an explaining detective that leads to the revelation of the culprit. Lily and the other sheep are well-versed in these stories. They see all the wrinkles coming before they get there. They are always hanging around the periphery, helping to guide Officer Derry to the truth. No one seems to think it’s strange the way these sheep are just hanging around. Consider bringing a hanky to this show because somehow it gets credibly intense in the second half and you will likely need it. I was prepared for something a little silly, and hopefully entertaining, but I came away from it all wrung out in the best ways. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, your heart may go pit-a-pat. Big franchise potential here too, for better or worse.

The Terror (1917)

[spoilers] This short novel is one of Arthur Machen’s more effective tales, at least until it gets to the end and starts offering up the explanations, which unfortunately are lame. But until then it made me nervous more than once. “The terror” is a series of murders and fatal accidents no one can explain. It is set in 1915 and very much mindful there’s a terrible war going on. A fair amount of the speculation on who’s doing it focuses on the suspicion that German agents are somehow embedded in the Welsh countryside, wreaking havoc. But there’s very little evidence of their presence, and the circumstances of some of the deaths rule that out entirely. A serial killer (our modern term) is the most popular theory but there is also evidence pointing away from that. Plus the victims are killed by different methods, which is unusual for such a fiend. Two deaths occur in a similar timeframe but separated by too much distance for one person to do both, so eventually that is ruled out too. Law enforcement types arrive and impose curfews and limit people’s movements—no one allowed near the cliffs where people have fallen, for example. But that also has limited effect on the ongoing terror. Among other things you can really feel Machen’s anxieties about the war. This is not Machen’s only story from that time with the element. See particularly “The Bowmen,” which single-handedly established a sense of divine intervention assisting Britain and the Western allies. For most of The Terror Machen keeps piling on and, as I said, piling on effectively and skillfully. It’s often scary. This may be in part because we know Machen was a spiritualist whose stories often indulge the ineffable and the powerful, against which we poor pitiful humans have little defense. As the tension flies high so do our expectations, until it’s a perfect mystery and hard to imagine what it could be. I stuck with it knowing Machen can deliver on this kind of stuff. Alas, not this time. It turns out to be antiwar animals in allegiance, all kinds of animals—birds, bees, beasts of the fields, etc. They are alarmed and indignant about all these years of the Great War, later known as World War I (because humans just had to do it one more time). I mean, I don’t blame the critters. I’m outraged and indignant myself, even born many years later. But still, The Terror is ultimately a little too lame.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Chronic (1992)

I’m normally opposed to the very idea of “guilty pleasure,” which is usually about toxic social pressures and often involves hit pop songs—KISS fans secretly liking the Carpenters and Olivia Newton-John, stuff like that. In a natural development people have come to pride themselves on their guilty pleasures. But for me, in the case of Dr. Dre’s auspicious debut album, both parts of the term apply. I genuinely feel guilty about liking this set so much. Swearing a lot is just the start of it. All the N-words hamper singalongs. The sexism goes beyond mere sexism and proceeds directly to misogyny (“Bitches ain't shit but hoes and tricks,” etc.). Powerful automatic weapons, grotesque street violence, and swaggering Black-on-Black crime are frequent themes. The sex talk and scenes are so explicit they verge on revolting, viz., the “walnuts / chestnuts / deez nuts” skit. Speaking of skits—as I was just last month, complaining about them—they bust out all over here. I admit they have their moments even as my general objections to skits stand. One, “The $20 Sack Pyramid,” is nearly three minutes. “The Doctor’s Office” is a full minute and coarse as it can be. I worry about my neighbors when I start sneaking up the volume on The Chronic, which brings us to the “pleasure” side of the equation. I take it as entertainment so I can evade the problematics, as a full-on musical revue complete with comedy interludes. The only thing missing is a guy spinning plates at the top of sticks. I know it’s a tough balance here. The comedy may not land reliably, but “The $20 Sack Pyramid” is lacerating social critique. As for the songs, all team-written by Death Row principals, they just roll from one great one to the next, with fresh hooks and poised raps and melodic jams and no question about who they are or what they’re doing. You have to accept that to get to the wonders of, say, “A [N-word] Witta Gun,” with its ominous chorus “Who’s the man with the master plan?” Full disclosure, I mostly missed Dre until Eminem opened his catalog for me 10 years on. I was all over Snoop Doggy Dogg at last then too. But here I am squeamish to engage, or reproduce, the language featured on this album, which I find entertaining and even funny more often than I would think. It’s not hard for me to play the whole thing at once—mostly enjoyable, with its pitfalls, most of the way. Maybe a little long. They push the Death Row label constantly and attack with announcements like: “This should be played at high volume, preferably in a residential area.” You know what to do next, despite perhaps feeling guilty about it. P.S. I also admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I love the cannabis positivity. Inspirational line: “Make my bud the Chronic, I want to get fucked up.”

Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, Italy / France, 179 minutes

Director: Luchino Visconti

Writers: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Giovanni Testori

Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno

Music: Nino Rota

Editor: Mario Serandrei

Cast: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Spyros Fokas, Max Cartier, Rocco Vidolazzi, Katina Paxinou, Roger Hanin, Paulo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale, Corrado Pani, Claudia Mori, Suzi Delair

Rocco and His Brothers is classified as an “epic melodrama” on Wikipedia, which I suspect is as much about its length as it is about, say, Nina Rota’s shimmering if too occasional score. The movie is BIG by design. The story is about the migration of a family of peasants, the Parondis, one mother and five brothers, from rural southern Italy to the modern urban environs of Milan. The family patriarch has died and the farm no longer supported the family anyway. The results are predictable at a high level, but Rocco and His Brothers is more about the details, which are often surprising. (See La Notte for more on modern Milan. See The Grapes of Wrath on migration.) There are five brothers and each gets a section of the movie: Vicenzo (Spyros Fokas), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and even little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), though that is more by way of a coda to the picture.

The main conflict here, a towering and epic one, is between Simone and Rocco, egged on by a bad woman with a good heart, Nadia (Annie Girardot with the most sparkling, riveting performance in the whole thing). On arrival in Milan, Simone quickly finds himself with a promising boxing career, which immediately goes to his head. This is also a boxing movie, I should say, and of course mandatory for aficionados of boxing movies. Simone’s thoroughgoing rottenness is a main theme here—you think he’s bad, but he only gets worse. He wins bouts and swaggers around with a lot of cash and an eye for the babes. He’s reluctant to do anything to help the family. He’s selfish. But he falls hard for Nadia, whose biography is practically shocking. I mean, it seemed sufficiently lurid to me. They don’t call this an epic melodrama for any old reason.