Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Link Wray, “Rumble” (1958)

[listen up!]

Link Wray’s “Rumble” was a few years late to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but it was the first something. Shoegaze, possibly, or dream-pop? Sonic Youth might have studied it closely. It’s an obvious influence on David Lynch’s musical projects. Jimmy Page cites it as a primary influence. So does Jack White, even U2’s The Edge. “Rumble” hits like a steamroller, dense with mass. In its own way it is very ur, even (or perhaps especially) as it stalled out at #16 in 1958. It should have been #1 for weeks and rivaled “Rock Around the Clock.” But the world may not have been entirely ready for it, though its influence now runs to the horizons. Others (notably Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Les Paul) had been exploring the tonal dynamics of the electric guitar, but no one previously treated it like a hot tub where you go take a soak. The best way to listen to “Rumble” is loud, of course, with eyes closed for maximal impact. Wray is in love with his ginormous chords and so am I. Reverb all over the place. His plectrum brushes the chords so slowly and methodically you can almost hear each string. The song plays slow and logy, hypnotic and seductive. Having established a mood so immersive it has your full attention (in a song that lasts only 2:26), Wray proceeds to begin abusing his instrument, whaling away on single strings and incidentally pointing the way to thrash, potentially yet one more innovation of this tune. We have heard it everywhere since 1958, all over oldies radio and in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, Blow, the original pilot for The Sopranos, the Japanese cult classic Wild Zero, and many more. It never gets old. I’m a little amazed it didn’t turn up in one of David Lynch’s pictures.

What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (1992)

I’m embarrassed to note it took me so long to get to this interesting music history, by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, that a 30th anniversary edition has already been out for a few years. That’s the version I’m pointing to below. It’s probably even better than this original, adding forewords by Billy Vera and Dave Marsh, whose bio here asserts he is the dean of rock criticism, an interesting choice of words. As per the question in the title, the book is a densely researched list of 50 songs that are candidates for the honor, from “Blues, Part 2” by Jazz at the Philharmonic (1944) to “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (1956). All the ones I might have nominated are here: “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris & His All Stars, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston With His Delta Cats, “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Work With Me, Annie” by the Royals and the Midnighters, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and 41 more, including the correct answer (according to me) “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. Each song is profiled in great detail, with chart positions, when and where recorded, release dates, interesting anecdotes, and more. Along the way a lot of industry currents are discussed, such as the stories of cover versions, the abuse of independent labels by the majors even as the indies marched on to further heights, and many of the interconnections between musicians, producers, and songwriters. Some of these songs I barely knew, such as “Blues, Part 2,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” or Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man.” All were a pleasure to hear, even if I think some are barely rock ‘n’ roll. “Blues, Part 2,” for example, sounds much closer to me to free jazz, thanks to the wild, iconic tenor sax play by Illinois Jacquet. Maybe in some ways it prefigures the Stooges’ Fun House? It’s not on my streaming service, but I found it on youtube, posted by someone inspired by this book (likely 2nd ed.). It’s not just book and library research here. Dawson and Propes spoke to dozens of people involved with these records, including artists, producers, distributors, and many other industry figures. I was sad to reach “Heartbreak Hotel” because I cared less about answering the primary question and just wanted to keep hearing the stories of how great rock ‘n’ roll records came to be.

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

L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

“England Underway” (1993)

This story by Terry Bisson with its kooky, whimsical premise—perhaps too kooky and whimsical for me—was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards in short fiction categories (it is apparently long enough to be a “novelette” by Nebula standards). It surprised me that Bisson is from the US, Kentucky specifically, as the story succeeds in feeling British. Or maybe it feels British to me the way an American conceives it. Anyway, for whatever reason—plate tectonics is the only detail given that sounds remotely plausible, but who cares in a fantasy, right?—England and some British territories (not Ireland) have come loose and set out west across the Atlantic. No one knows why. It’s all over the news. I have to admit some of this story went over my head because I don’t know UK geography and have never been good with spatial relations. The entire land mass is also spinning slowly so the south of England becomes the east and so forth. It’s confusing. The story does have a soothing, gentle tone, milking humor from the absurdity of the situation as well as UK politics (pre-EU), especially regarding Ireland. The main character is a British chap set in his ways, with a dog and a niece in the US who writes him monthly and says he must come visit to see her baby, his grand-niece. Eventually England delivers him for the visit and he meets the baby, shortly after which England departs the New York harbor, headed east, presumably returning. There’s a nice sense of how strange it would be if England were literally only a ferry ride away from New York, but what’s strange and interesting in this story is mostly swamped by what’s cute. On the whole it’s well done but on the whole it is merely cute. In a way it plays to my own, mostly unfortunate preconceptions about fantasy—that it’s intended to be harmless if not entirely vapid (I say this knowing better now that horror is a subset of fantasy). But in other ways the story pulls against my bad attitude. Though Bisson is obviously trafficking in British stereotypes he’s doing it with a good deal of urbane charm and wit. I’m curious how Americans and Brits respond comparatively to it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Americans like it more.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Willows, “Church Bells May Ring” (1956)

[listen up!]

The Willows were a five-piece doo wop act out of Harlem who fell victim to the 1950s industry convention of covering Black artists threatening the pop charts with white groups who had the resources (label PR and dough) to nab the bigger hits. It produced strange and somewhat embarrassing results, such as Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and getting the bigger hit with it. Teens of the ‘50s, what hath thou wrought? The Willows were successfully prevented from reaching the pop charts, but the Diamonds (from Toronto) took their inferior version of what they retitled “The Church Bells May Ring” to #14 in 1956. The Diamonds version all but eliminates the bells, buried in the mix except for jazzy solos that miss the point of the song. What makes the Willows’ version so resounding is exactly the pounding bells it pushes so hard. The song, written by the Willows, was originally called “Church Bells Are Ringing” or maybe just “Church Bells”—church bells were always going to be involved. And, indeed, they are what makes the song stand out. They’re chimes, or tubular bells—as it happens, played by studio hand that day Neil Sedaka. They add a rhythmic luster around which the lusty singers dart in harmony. The song feels like the happiest wedding day, bursting with upbeat energy. “Oh ah linga linga linga linga ling ding-dong,” chants the lead vocalist with exuberance. You never knew you could dance to church bells but now you do. To be clear, I have nothing against the Diamonds. I like their big dance hit of a couple years later, “The Stroll.” But it’s a fact that the Willows plainly have the better version of this song.

Eddington (2025)

The range of opinion is wide on the latest from director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid). Filmmaker John Waters put Eddington at the top of his list of the best pictures of 2025, while movie critic Glenn Kenny put it last on his list, in the category “No Cigar” by itself with the brushoff comment, “Piss off, MAGA boy.” I’m somewhere between. It’s a mixed bag. It’s basically the Covid pandemic as viewed and experienced from the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, but it’s a satire so lots of things are exaggerated. Eddington is only tangentially related to the disease, to Black Lives Matter protests, to QAnon, or even to masking. But it’s all here. Mandates required masks in public, as I’m sure you recall—the main virtue of Eddington is the way it brings 2020 back so vividly. Masks are an ongoing issue here and, yes, the picture is sympathetic to people who won’t wear them. “There’s no Covid here,” Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) keeps saying, although he develops a terrible cough after an altercation with a homeless person who probably is infected. Sheriff Cross is in a dispute with the mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is working with shady tech bros to open a massive data center that he promises will bring jobs to the town. Sheriff Cross decides to run for mayor against Garcia’s reelection bid, dresses up his rig like the one Robert Altman used in Nashville for the Replacement Party candidate Hal Phillip Walker, and cruises the town speechifying through the loudspeaker as he goes. Like Aster’s last picture, Beau Is Afraid, Eddington is long and muddled. It's trying to stuff everything it can into it from 2020. The burgeoning hunt for pedophiles under influence of QAnon, for example. Sheriff Cross’s staff of three includes a Black man (Michael Ward), which leads to lots of easy plot developments. At least Beau had a great first hour before going off the rails. Eddington has isolated impressive points, such as Phoenix’s performance. He’s great as he always is, maybe even a little better here, disappearing into the role. The white-kid protesters are treated as robotic woke-spewing morons. One tries to explain himself to his parents, saying they’re “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” Certainly from the MAGA point of view that’s how the Left in this country can look, whereas the MAGA-friendly types here are arguably more down to earth. Maybe I’m talking myself into not liking this one. It didn’t give me that much to take away. Approach with caution.

Housekeeping (1980)

I thought this strange and beautiful novel by Marilynne Robinson worked really well, a kind of coming-of-age story of a girl raised first by her grandmother, then by two great-aunts (briefly), and finally by her Aunt Sylvie, her mother’s sister. The setting is Idaho or western Montana, probably in the 1950s. The narrator is Ruthie Stone, writing from memory about her girlhood many years later as an adult. Her grandfather died in a spectacular train accident. Later her mother committed suicide. Ruthie is with her younger sister Lucille for many years, but eventually Lucille runs away, leaving Ruthie with Sylvie. Sylvie is a loner and a natural transient, often sleeping with her clothes and shoes on, ready to depart at short notice. She can’t keep house and spends many days by herself disappearing into the woods. The title is less a reference to cleaning and more about what it takes to keep a roof over one’s head. This thing about spending whole days in the woods runs in the family apparently, as Ruthie and Lucille spend much of one school year doing it too. Eventually Lucille decides to go straight and runs away, making her home with a schoolteacher. That leaves Ruthie with Sylvie and the court system which is coming for them. Ruthie, it turns out, might well be the transient type herself. Her voice is straightforward yet lyrical. She makes the Idaho / Montana landscape alien and a little weird. This is not a typical western by any means—largely, perhaps, because there are no men except on the furthest margins—but the landscape alone makes it a western. No horses or Indians, but a mountainous land, western weather patterns, and of course trains and maybe Mormons. The language can lapse into dense passages of description and discussions of memory and perception. It’s odd but never particularly feels unlikely. I had a hard time feeling like I could get a handle on Sylvie, but I always liked her. Ruthie had her misgivings—and Lucille too, obviously—but in the end she comes to love Sylvie, fiercely, even as she enters a lifetime of estrangement from Lucille. Strange and wonderful, Housekeeping is a short and utterly fine little novel.

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

Kinda Kinks (1965)

The ever-amorphous state of mid-‘60s British Invasion LPs applies to the Kinks too. There are UK and US versions of Kinda Kinks, their second UK album, as well as at least two deluxe package editions that are equally close to essential. It seems likely, by the way their discography goes, that the Kinks were also bound like the Beatles and many others to an industry convention that frowned on releasing a single and then including it on the next album, whereas it was somehow OK to release singles from an album. Another significant factor is that EPs sold well in the UK but did not in the US. Because of these and other factors, and even though UK and US Kinks releases were identical as of late 1965 with The Kink Kontroversy, there are strange gaps all over their catalog. Songs like “All Day and All of the Night,” “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” and “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” don’t have proper album homes now except on the CD deluxe package editions that started arriving in the ‘90s. In many ways the best version of Kinda Kinks is now found there. I know at least two on my streaming service, one of 53 minutes with 23 songs, and another of 80 minutes with 35 songs. I prefer the shorter one—many of the extra dozen on the 80-minute edition are redundancies, alternate versions, more b-sides (experiments that don’t always come off but usually have at least one interesting point), and/or are associated with live recordings and/or radio interviews (admittedly charming). Both playlists kick off with the 12 songs from the original UK release, which includes “Naggin’ Woman” and “Tired of Waiting for You,” neither of which are on the US version. It’s somewhat amazing when you consider “Tired” was one of their biggest hits in the US, #6 in early 1965. But that song instead wound up on a US-only release, Kinks-Size, where “All Day and All of the Night” also landed (admittedly a pretty good album!).

The nine songs on Kinda Kinks shared by the UK and US versions are as good as anything on the first album, notably in their lively jolting mode of ecstatic racket typified by “You Really Got Me.” With perspective, we can see it was rock ‘n’ roll transmogrifying into rock in front of our eyes and as early as 1964. But that’s not all the Kinks were up to. Elements of skiffle and music hall show up here as well and the songwriting is often ingenious, musical, distinct in style from song to song, and infectious. I may finally be tired after all these years of singing along with “Tired of Waiting for You,” but it remains an irresistible singalong even in my latter-day zombie variations. There’s more ecstatic racket in the cover of “Dancin’ in the Street,” which is exciting and surprisingly not that far off the Motown original by Martha & the Vandellas. Convincing tender exercises show up here as well, such as “Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl.” To cap it off, there’s “Something Better Beginning,” with its delicate baroque air and dense lyrical shadings: “Is this the start of another heart breaker / Or something better beginning / Something better beginning / Something better beginning.” I could do without the bawling “Naggin” Woman,” but even the stripped-down concentrated original UK 27-minute version of Kinda Kinks is quite enjoyable, standing up to close scrutiny and daily play, a pretty darned good album of itself. But there’s more, as they say on the late-nite shows, much much more.

Bell Notes, “I’ve Had It” (1958)

[listen up!]

I was listening to Vol. 2 of the Ace label’s excellent Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll: Hot 100 Hits From 1954-1963 when the Bell Notes’ one and only hit, which reached #6 in February 1959, leapt out and reminded me vividly of the early-‘80s cowpunk act Rank and File and specifically their theme song “Rank and File.” It seems likely this could be settled in a court of law because “Rank and File” sounds more like “I’ve Had It” than “My Sweet Lord” sounds like “He’s So Fine.” Just sayin’. The greater and more obvious influence on the Long Island act Bell Notes is the Everly Brothers, in both their close harmonies and in the sense in their songs of ineffective peevishness, miffed by the way things are going. In “Bird Dog,” “Problems,” “Walk Right Back,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” they have reason to feel short-changed and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Just so, the singer of this song has “had it,” an expression, “I’ve had it,” usually spoken by people who are likely to keep having it and know it. Exasperation as real as it gets, in a way. As for the cowpunk lift, I would not call it exactly theft on the part of Rank and File, just a pronounced family resemblance between songs, or maybe a kind of homage or salute (though it’s unlikely many in 1982 remembered the Bell Notes, who I have to keep fighting myself not to think of as the Bell Tones). Rank and File’s version, if you want to call it that, is twice as long and all rocked up heavy on a big drumkit and twangy electric guitar, with all-new lyrics. You can imagine what the “la-la-la-la” singing Bell Notes might have to say about it. It’s right there in the title of their only hit.