Wonderstruck (2017)

Brian Selznick wrote the screenplay here, based on his own YA novel. Among other things (a good many other things, including deafness, cinema, and nostalgia), Wonderstruck is director Todd Haynes’s love letter and odd meditation on museums and curation. Arguably it works, visually enchanting of course, and some good music, but it’s hampered all the way by an overly busy narrative scheme. I was not entirely surprised to find that Selznick’s only other credit on IMDb is the source novel for director Martin Scorsese’s 2011 ode to silent cinema and other dreams, Hugo. I haven’t seen Hugo since it came out and thus don’t remember it well, but I often felt like I was having a déjà vu while watching Wonderstruck and I’m pretty sure Hugo was the source of it. Wonderstruck is not one but two period pieces—one set in 1927 involving Rose (Millicent Simmonds), the deaf daughter of a silent movie star, and the other set in 1977 involving a boy, Ben (Oakes Fegley), whose librarian mother has recently died unexpectedly before she ever told him who his father is. Ben now wants to find him. A freak lightning strike has recently made him deaf. Things like that happen in this one. Both Ben and Rose are about 12 and both end up running away to New York City. I was very nervous about Ben in New York in 1977—sure enough, he’s soon robbed. But things tend to fall right for both of our characters. Ben makes a friend about his age who can hear but also happens to know sign language. Ben doesn’t, but still, it comes in handy. The 1927 scenes are black & white and many establishing shots often look lifted directly from silent movies. The 1977 scenes are in color but it’s hazy and suffused with yellow and orange tones, like The Wonder Years. There are some familiar faces here—Julianne Moore, Michelle Williams—but mostly this is the same kind of dreamy soft-focused feel-good picture that Hugo is. It took a long time for these characters to reach me, but eventually I got there. If the closing scenes made me reach for a hanky, I’m dutybound to report it was more by way of manipulation than any genuine merit to the story. The story has points of genuine merit, but they tend to be lost in the complications as the two stories drive to their connecting point by way of a series of outrageous coincidences that are strictly for those who want to believe. I’ve read that Haynes likes to classify his stuff as alternating “boy” and “girl” movies. With Carol the immediate predecessor that would make this a “boy” movie. Ben probably does get more of the screen time, but Wonderstruck is not so easily classified.

“The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife” (1925)

This story by Ernest Hemingway works as a kind of counterpoint to his “Indian Camp” story from the same In Our Time collection. Where Nick Adams’s father the doctor is competent and even heroic in “Indian Camp,” here he is petty and irrational, though it’s not entirely clear why. He wants some logs that have washed up on his riverfront to be cut up for firewood. The man coming to do that with a crew makes a point of saying the doctor is stealing the property of a logging company. He says it doesn’t matter to him, but he still insists on the point. This in turn enrages the doctor, who basically tells him to get the hell out of there. It’s apparent there’s something between these two men but we don’t learn in this story what it is. The doctor tells his wife one thing. It could be the source of the rancor—it wouldn’t be unreasonable—but the story seems to imply he’s just telling his wife something to keep her from asking more questions. Then he goes off into the woods looking for Nick, who is reading a book. Nick likes to tag along on his father’s calls. This is another very short story—and similarly prefaced in the collection with a “Chapter II” paragraph about war—and it is another packed full with incident. It suggests typical frictions in a community, how people who know each other so well get along or don’t get along. Whatever is between the two men is probably not that interesting. These little frictions rarely are. They are more often just litanies of slights that have grown into resentments and hostility. The doctor seems much more peevish than our view of him in “Indian Camp.” But he’s still a hero to Nick. Both stories remind me of what I liked most about Hemingway in the first place—readable, plainspoken, but full of sneaky complexity. I also (sometimes) like the artistic pretensions of the lone paragraphs or prose poems floating between stories. I recognize them as pretentious, under influence of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and such, but they work about as often as they don’t. “Indian Camp” is probably the better story, but I like the deliberate way this story interacts with that one. The constant is the father-son relationship, even as much else about the doctor seems to change. We’ll see how far this goes, but for the moment I’m relieved and happy to find stories so plainly good by Hemingway. He is finding his voice here in a very pure way, albeit a voice I came to think much less of. I’m almost ready for another visit to The Old Man and the Sea.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

West Germany / Italy, 896 minutes

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writers: Alfred Doblin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Photography: Xaver Schwarzenberger

Music: Peer Raben

Editor: Juliane Lorenz

Cast: Gunter Lamprecht, Franz Buchrieser, Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Annemarie Duringer, Barbara Valentin, Brigitte Mira, Roger Fritz, Ivan Desny, Volker Spengler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karin Baal, Hark Bohm, Gerhard Zwerenz, Traute Hoess, Udo Kier, Fritz Schediwy, Claus Holm

Director and screenwriter Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, simply by virtue of its dazzling, massive, and sustained 15-hour volume, probably has to be accounted as Fassbinder’s one greatest masterpiece (even if critics in the roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? seem to favor Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Berlin Alexanderplatz is a brilliant character study as well as a brilliant profile of Berlin in 1928, in a tradition of movies such as the 1927 silent documentary Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis. Berlin in 1928 was roiling with social and political turmoil and economic despair. Our man Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht, who is so good here it’s hard to describe) is introduced by Alfred Doblin in the 1929 source novel as “an erstwhile cement- and transport-worker in Berlin. He has just been discharged from prison where he has been doing time because of former incidents, and is now back in Berlin, determined to lead a decent life.”

What Doblin elides as “former incidents” is what Fassbinder spends a good deal of the TV miniseries dwelling on. Biberkopf formerly made his way as a pimp and in a fit of fury beat his prostitute girlfriend Ida to death. Berlin Alexanderplatz includes the murder scene in the first of its 13 episodes (plus a two-hour epilogue) and it is returned to over and over. It’s in many of these episodes. It is exactly what Biberkopf is trying to escape even as circumstances return him to it without mercy. He was sent to prison for it, serving four years (in this day and age it seems like nothing for a murder, doesn’t it?). At the beginning of the miniseries he’s back on the streets again, determined to go straight. It’s 1928 Berlin. What could go wrong?

“The Tiger’s Bride” (1979)

So this story by Angela Carter from the Bloody Chamber collection is also based on (inspired by, infected with) the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast like the story before it, “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon.” This time the big cat Beast is a tiger. Tiger! Tiger! Known in the story as “Milord,” he wears a mask to disguise himself as human, or more likely to hide his self-perceived ugliness. There’s a subtly implied suggestion that, for all his beastliness, The Beast is also burdened somehow by shame and infinite sadness. He’s most himself seen in the wilds, all raiment removed, running beside the horse. Beauty is the first-person narrator and not ever referred to as Beauty, whereas The Beast in this story gets even “the” capitalized. Brilliant first line, which sets the story in motion suitably: “My father lost me to The Beast at cards.” A lot of stories in The Bloody Chamber were new with publication of the collection in 1979, including this Lyon and tiger pair. I’d like to know more about the sequence of writing them. Did she write them one after another, as they appear in the collection? They are somewhat like mirror reflected images. In “Mr. Lyon,” the Beast becomes more human. In the second, this story, Beauty more enters into The Beast’s remote, isolated, wild realm. I like the way sexuality is treated here, a delicate thing. The Beast has won her (from her father, gambling at cards) but all he wants from her is to see her naked once, which she refuses. It’s not so much modesty as willfulness, an assertion of independence. Already her own fierce animalistic side is incited and it is powerful. Another detail that seems to crop up frequently in Carter’s stories makes its dutiful appearance here, viz., a white rose. Purity, loyalty, etc., I guess? In the end it looks like this could be a couple and relationship that lasts, as Dr. Phil might say. There is little overt humor to Carter, except of the sardonic “man plans; God laughs” strain, a rich vein indeed. That is plentiful and another point of her fascinating, multifaceted voice. She’s just applying it to fairy tales and folk horror—so simple, so effective. Her father had a gambling problem and now here we are, hunting together for game in the wilderness.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Read story online.

“How to Tell a Story” (1895)

This short piece is the title essay in a collection Mark Twain published in 1897. It’s an interesting look specifically at the various problems of the humor piece, abstracted as such. He uses a joke as illustration that is actually funny—literally made me laugh. “There are several kinds of stories,” he writes, “but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” He discusses the problem awhile, turning to Artemis Ward for his example (“considered to be America’s first stand-up comedian,” per Wikipedia), along with the joke, called “The Wounded Soldier.” Twain describes his own approach perhaps better than anyone could, which he used all his career: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art [of storytelling].” Then he gets into timing, which he calls “the pause,” a deadly and delicate matter. This leads to “The Golden Arm.” Twain illustrates the utility and technique of “the pause,” but unfortunately indulges dialect in a way here that too readily suggests racism. A 19th-century African-American from Missouri tells the story, complete with the prized pause. “You must get the pause right,” Twain concludes; “and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.” It’s true, and Twain is too modest—which is not really like him—to mention it’s even harder to capture in writing. I’ve been thinking through these difficulties a lot as I go through Twain because his humor is my single favorite thing about his work. He doesn’t always pull off his various gags but his comic instincts always seem solid and I often appreciate even his misses. His humor makes a lot of his miscues worth bearing, though it’s not always easy. Reading across his career, it’s plain that he learned and changed and became reasonably more enlightened in his old age. Indeed, he was probably considered radical by contemporaries. His outrage about things like US foreign policy, however, was not a bit unreasonable. But he may have lost some of his comic instincts then and become more humorless. This piece suggests he spent most of his career knowing well what he was doing as a humorist.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
Read piece online.
Listen to piece online.

12. Pink Floyd, Ummagumma (1969) – Live LP

[2016 review here]

By my lights you can altogether dispense with the studio LP on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma double-album package. Too much empty noodling from solo Floyds unbound. But the live LP stands as a certain template for how it was getting done in the psychedelic era proper: choice live cuts from different shows, four songs total, two per side, all coming in long (8:25, 8:47, 9:21, 12:51), and all recorded with faces figuratively turned to the night sky. I heard it first as a 15-year-old and consider it still my introduction to space-rock. Only two of the four openly evoke outer space (or the travels therof in the mind)—Syd Barrett’s “Astronomy Domine” (from The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, an album generally more favored as a Floyd psychedelic peak) and Roger Waters’s “Set the Control for the Heart of the Sun” from their second album. It was the Waters song that caught me. The comically somber tone establishes the levels of heavy at 11, and the wandering, systematic build-up unfolds from splashy cymbals and a pattern on the toms to a doleful bass line and eerie space-wind keyboards. Ultimately the vocals come crawling in: muttered, semi-audible. They are worried about something, or they have been hypnotized and overtaken by a strange alien race. They seem to be piloting a vessel. “Set the controls for the heart of the sun,” one tells another in a calibrated emotionless tone. Does that sound like a good idea? What is happening out here in the solar system? There are similar unsettling notes in “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” which started as the B-side of a single that basically went nowhere (“Point Me at the Sky”). The title is jokey (like who’s Eugene, brother?), and the music at first seems intended as a kind of gentle mountain meadow for the mind. Then they insert a few minutes of a horror movie into the middle. “Careful with that axe, Eugene,” someone says emerging from the layers, which is followed by wanton titanic screaming folded into and flailing out of the mix for a minute or more before we are returned to normally scheduled programming, the whole attack amplified and intensified for the meditative finish. It reminds me of the great “One of These Days” on the Meddle album, which is mostly an instrumental but someone wanted to add, “One of these days I’m going to cut you into little pieces.” Where does Pink Floyd get these terrifying ideas? They are like the bruises that make fruit almost too sweet. I’m going to guess Waters, whose dour and rancid views would come to dominate the band over the years, but I can’t say for sure. “Astronomy Domine” kicks it all off nice and hard with another nod to erstwhile mate Barrett. It’s a real rouser and a good start. The last piece, “A Saucerful of Secrets,” is broken down into four parts: “I. Something Else,” “II. Syncopated Pandemonium,” etc. Beware of long tracks broken down this way. Yes, it can work, e.g., Yes, “Close to the Edge,” but more often, as here, it does not. It’s nearly 13 minutes but I’m willing to call it the only flaw in this mighty majestic set, now unfortunately derided per Wikipedia by the band and others. Lighten up, folks. This is the good stuff.

Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind (2022)

Ethan Coen’s documentary about Jerry Lee Lewis does not add a lot to what we already know about the iconic rock ‘n’ roller, but it has the advantage of being posthumous. It was released shortly after Lewis’s death in October 2022, offering the most panoramic view yet of his entire career (much like the essential I Am Everything did for Little Richard). As the picture notes toward the end, Lewis outlived a good many of his peers, including Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard. This documentary overall leans more toward hagiography, never really addressing the many scandals that swirled around and dogged Lewis. The good news here is that means more time for the music. Who cares whether he murdered anyone or if there really was a hound dog no one ever saw before or since howling outside the window the night he was born? The music ranges across his rock ‘n’ roll hits, then his country music chapter, and chases all the way down to his pentecostal gospel music roots in Ferriday, Louisiana. His cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart get their time here too, as does his sister, briefly, Linda Gail. They all agree Jerry Lee was the most talented of them all, and Lewis of course modestly allows they’re right. When the music and performances are all stacked up in such proximity his whole deal does have a certain sameness—but what sameness! He gets the rumbling boogie-woogie undertow going and layers practically anything he likes on top, his own stuff and covers of songs, rock ‘n’ roll, country, gospel, anything. There’s some great footage of Lewis with Tom Jones on an exuberant cover of “Tutti Frutti.” Lewis goes out of his way to bearhug Chuck Berry in an extended sequence and pays his respects to Little Richard too. But on the matter of Elvis Presley, he remained dubious to the end. He never exalts Elvis for anything and credits Colonel Tom Parker for all the success, which made him basically consistent to the end. Little Richard had a similar problem and I have to say I’m inclined to agree with them more than not. Jerry Lee Lewis was as original and dynamic a rock ‘n’ roll performer as anyone else and there’s approximately 70 minutes of proof in this tidy documentary, worth seeing for the musical performances alone.

Wire’s Pink Flag (2009)

About half of this treatment for the 33-1/3 series by Wilson Neate of Wire’s classic debut is devoted to going through the album track by track, a daunting task in a way for an album with 21 tracks clocking in under 36 minutes. I’ve always been in the minority on Wire, more of a partisan for their third album, 154, but Neate has rounded up a lot of notables stumping for Pink Flag, including Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, and notorious producer at large, R.I.P.), Graham Coxon (Blur), Robert Pollard (Guided by Voices), and others. Neate spends the first half mainly on positioning Wire within the rock and punk-rock welter as it existed in 1977. He makes a good argument that Wire was set apart from punk-rock—and from rock—by the band’s clinical aesthetics, which developed further as they went. There’s also a good deal of interesting information here about how the album was recorded and the various essential contributions of producer Mike Thorne. I know Pink Flag reasonably well and had a gratifying session studying the track-by-track here closely, playing each song, reading Neate’s text, and often playing the song again. Among other things it helped me identify definitively my own specific favorites, such as “Three Girl Rhumba” (1:23) and especially “Lowdown” (2:26). More than anything it convinced me of what I’ve always sensed intuitively, which is that Pink Flag is perhaps thought of best as a single cohesive whole (or two, given vinyl albums) rather than 21 disparate parts. I tend to lose track of this album at the molecular level of individual songs. Neate also focuses closely on the mostly illegible lyrics, reading closely into them, as Pink Flag was that unusual punk-rock album which included a lyric sheet. Even knowing the lyrics and reading along with Neate and an online lyric sheet I had a hard time making them out. But I’m more of the school that most rock lyrics are a tantalizing distraction at best, with some exceptions such as slogans, chants, and many Bob Dylan songs. Most times, when I actually look into it, the specific words and their meaning are more beside the point. But Neate would be one to disagree, and his exegeses are detailed, multileveled, complex, and sometimes interesting. It was a treat to hear Pink Flag again and I appreciated the wide scope of interview subjects assembled here. It makes complete sense, for example, that Robert Pollard is a big fan of Pink Flag. Much of his own career has been in pursuit of the kinds of song fragments found on it. This 33-1/3 is solid for all fans of the band and album.

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

Twin Peaks (2017)

[Earlier review here.]

Twin Peaks: The Return, USA, 1,014 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: Mark Frost, David Lynch

Photography: Peter Deming

Music: Angelo Badalamenti, Julee Cruise, Johnny Jewel, Chromatics, Cactus Blossoms, Au Revoir Simone, Paris Sisters, Trouble, Blunted Beatz, Sharon Van Etten, Nine Inch Nails, Rebekah Del Rio, James Marshall, Lissie, ZZ Top, Veils

Editor: Duwayne Dunham

Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Sheryl Lee, Michael Horse, Miguel Ferrer, David Lynch, Chrysta Bell, Robert Forster, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern, Harry Dean Stanton, Tim Roth, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Grace Zabriskie, Catherine E. Coulson, Russ Tamblyn, Sherilyn Fenn, Peggy Lipton, Everett McGill, Richard Beymer, Ashley Judd, Frank Silva, David Duchovny, Dana Ashbrook, Madchen Amick, Harry Goaz, Kimmy Robertson, Matthew Lillard, Melissa Jo Bailey, Patrick Fischler, Eamon Ferren, Walter Olkewicz, Michael Cera, George Griffith, Don Murray, David Patrick Kelly, Christophe Zajac-Denek, John Pirruccello, Jim Belushi, Robert Knepper, Clark Middleton, David Bowie, Jay Aaseng, Jake Wardle

I thought—and still think—that 18 episodes and 17 hours is on the long side for a TV season, let alone a feature movie on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? It’s long even for the 21st-century version of director and cowriter David Lynch. But as I geared down for the soporific pace of the third season of Twin Peaks it came back to me that at heart the franchise is a loving parody and embrace of TV’s soap opera style, latterly dignified as “daytime drama” shortly before ushered off the stage of US entertainment, along with network TV at large. At the moment we appear to be down to four: The Bold and the Beautiful, Days of Our Lives, General Hospital, and The Young and the Restless. I recall hearing that some of these soaps got into wild storylines, with time travel, serial killers, and aliens from outer space and such, though I can’t find any evidence of that online at the moment. The point is: for daytime dramas, 17 hours is not that much, maybe a month’s work.

To be clear, I’m not complaining about what I found on a recent return to the epic third season (acknowledgments to the Showtime network for enabling this unlikely development even to happen). It’s just that it’s incredibly slow, one of the slowest things I’ve ever seen episode to episode. Even two in a row tended to set my mind wandering off-topic to things like grocery lists. It is ridiculous, often hilarious, and strangely meditative. Twin Peaks: The Return, as it was called on initial release, launches or picks up approximately 1 million narrative threads that are touched on in random turns. Most of the principals from the original run in the early ‘90s are on hand, 25 years older. Lots more stars of profile made it into the cast too. I often didn’t know what was going on (“didn’t know what was going on”). Some threads are resolved, some are only kind of resolved, and some are just dropped, including a highly indeterminate finish with a lot of screaming from Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee, then and now) and a wandering, unsettling version of an interdimensional Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie). Kyle MacLachlan gets top billing and he should, playing multiple roles.

“Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly” (1976)

Dennis Etchison’s very short story is more evidence for his way of finding the hubs and spokes of evil in modern life—in freeway rest stops, heavy traffic, spring breaks. In this story it is a 24-hour coin-operated laundromat in a big city neighborhood. It’s easy to be skeptical, noting the vaguely hysterical title, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things in this story that work, and work well. In a way I could stay all night in that laundromat, paradoxically at once a source of comfort (clean laundry, chore done) and anxiety (strange others, disease, night). Our man on the scene, insomniac, is not alone. There’s a woman, “twenty-nine going on forty.” And she’s talking to herself. While handwashing a heavily blood-stained bedsheet. Talking to herself about a murder. Implying she manipulated her own child into doing it, killing her husband, his father. If she is to be believed—if this story is to be believed. Which is not easy, except it’s 3 in the morning, she is a stranger, and Etchison does the smart thing, getting in and out of the story fast. It’s far-fetched but not out of reach. Suppose it was you handwashing a heavily blood-stained bedsheet when someone walks in. One way is to act crazy, go maximum creepy, hoping to chase the person out. And in fact it works well in this case. Our guy takes a powder, quick. I think it’s a stretch for her to say she manipulated her kid to murder. It feels like either she or Etchison—and Etchison seems most likely—is piling on for effect, making her such a heartless, calculating mother. But it could all be a ruse too, she might just be protecting herself to keep strangers at a distance. So there’s wiggle room for interpreting what’s going on. And there’s really not much else to this. It’s not a story of the uncanny at all, more like one more episode in the human comedy, this one straying into a dark area, with laundry. Etchison never lets drop the grim mask, but the brevity and outrageous scenario play more to a tinge of farce. That’s all right too as a kind of palate cleanser in a collection or anthology. He does it better than W.F Harvey anyway (e.g., “August Heat”) if not maybe as well as Saki. This story is much more a mood piece anyway—that laundromat is everything. It is mainly a laundromat story. And that’s enough, especially at this size. A late-night laundromat setting might even sustain something much longer than this little chip. But it’s a little chip that’s sized just right, and it comes off.

Dennis Etchison, The Dark Country
Story not available online.

The Devil, Me, and Jerry Lee (1998)

I’ve been toting this little memoir around with me for years, thinking it was written by Myra Gale Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis’s controversial cousin, 13-year-old bride, and third wife. But it’s actually by Linda Gail Lewis, Jerry Lee’s youngest sister, 12 years his junior. Linda Gail—this book temporarily put me in the habit of calling everyone by two names—sang with Jerry Lee for many years and eventually tried to make it on her own. Her stuff can be found on youtube. She actually had more marriages than Jerry Lee—eight to his seven—and she’s perfectly candid about the Lewis clan being “over-sexed.” She doesn’t go into any more detail than that, for which I was grateful. It’s a short book, well under 200 pages, and mostly a lot of anecdotes and funny and interesting stories about their adventures. She gives the devil his due right up-front but never goes deep into that. The devil makes them drink or take drugs a lot and accounts for their being over-sexed and that’s about it. I would have been interested in some thoughts about hellfire. She doesn’t deny a lot of Jerry Lee’s behavior, but she does deny he ever killed anyone. Mostly she explains all his famous bad behavior by the drugs and some personal problems (“demons”), about which she says nothing can be done. I think she’s right when she says they do things differently in the deep South—Ferriday, Louisiana, in this case, and the Assembly of God church. Jerry Lee, like Little Richard, was more or less sincere about his pentecostal beliefs, though Little Richard might have been a little better about staying on the straight and narrow once he got there—relatively speaking. Linda Gail’s memoir is not particularly essential, but it’s quick and fun to read and offers another view into one of the great early rock ‘n’ roll stars. Linda Gail does argue that Jerry Lee and Elvis Presley were great friends and that reports of Jerry Lee’s envy for Elvis’s greater success are exaggerated. Well, maybe. She’s certainly doing what a loving sister can do for his reputation, but I’m disinclined to believe her on that point. Otherwise I mostly take her at her word. Some great anecdotes here.

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

13. Dream Syndicate, The Days of Wine and Roses (1982)

[2006 review here]

It took me a little while to appreciate the squalls of this album again. My first time playing it recently made me wonder what I ever saw in it, but I was too focused then on the songs I never liked very much. For one thing, this was always more of a one-sided album—I mean, the title song is fine, with excellent shots of wailing feedback on the solo, and the vocal showcase for bass player Kendra Smith on “Too Little, Too Late” is good stuff too. But “Tell Me When It’s Over,” “That’s What You Always Say,” and of course “Halloween” were the main places I lived on The Days of Wine and Roses, sufficient unto the day. “Tell Me When It’s Over” hits with a bang and nags with a wheedling guitar figure, bearing an ominous mood of doom that almost instantly sets the day in shades of grayscale. Steve Wynn’s vocal sounds like it was recorded by Flesh Eater Chris D. to emphasize the aping of Lou Reed. The drums pound it up like fanfare for the turns and transitions, achieving shambolic glory. Already the album sounds exhausted by all experience, reporting in from some other-dimensional afterlife. Those not inclined to skipping songs may then sit through “Definitely Clean”—the drummer doesn’t seem to know what to do here and the tune’s little journeys up and down the scale are not much inspired. Never mind. “That’s What You Always Say” starts up next, once again entangling us in this exquisite gnawing mood of doom, grinding and insinuating into brain recesses. Chief songwriter, singer, and guitar player Wynn—enamored of feedback fillips that swirl all over the album like bats around the head in a cave—is not that much (at least here) on the electric guitar as anything other than a blunt instrument. But he knows where the guitar solos belong and that can be half the battle in these 2 guitars bass drums configurations. “Always Say” opens up a dark road. Traveling it is irresistible. “Then She Remembers” follows with some good fast loud energy and then it’s on to the main attraction, “Halloween.” Everyone involved seems to know perfectly well what they have with this one, a certain majesty of straightforward attack and rolling fierce flattening force. It’s so big, this final apotheosis of the doomed spirit on The Days of Wine and Roses, that they chose to fade it in, raising it up from wherever it came, let it cajole and roar for six minutes, and faded it out again, as if the beast had to be approached carefully from all sides. It’s perfect for Halloween too—not because there’s anything particularly ooky-spooky about it, but because it knows winter is coming. Play loud—there’s a possibility I will be saying this a lot from here on.

Baby Reindeer (2024)

[spoilers?] I heard it a lot of different ways about this relatively compact Netflix miniseries (seven episodes, 235 minutes) ... hilarious! scary! triggering! cringy! how dare he! ... which motivated a peek, which immediately sucked me into the whole thing. It’s a wild ride, the true story of a comedian—Donny Dunn, played by Richard Gadd, who wrote Baby Reindeer and stars in it, based on his auto fiction stand-up routine—and the stalker who tormented him, the trans woman he loved, the industry connection who raped him, the ex-girlfriend’s mother he lives with, and just why all this was happening to him. Questions, questions. Baby Reindeer looks insanely modern to a fogy like me. I’m sure Danny Dunn has nothing to do with it, for example, but I had to think about it. It’s not likely Gadd even knows who Danny Dunn is. For me, Jessica Gunning as Martha Scott the stalker steals the whole show. She is the epitome of large and in charge, with an eerie cackling laugh and a firehose of verbiage. She is life-of-the-party funny and charming. It takes a while to notice the mania never stops or even slows down and then to notice she seems to have some aggressive agenda. In fact, one of the problems of beset-upon Donny is that many people have a hard time believing Martha is not harmless. But she is not harmless. She is not harmless at all. She is scary as hell when the mood roars up on her. Gunning often had me pinned to my seat with her various brilliant fugue states. The rape story—all due content warnings, pay attention now—is the centerpiece of the story in many ways, the central motivating trauma. The relative kid-gloves treatment of the assault, bracketed by content warnings and information about support lines, seemed overplayed to me. But I can also think of some scenes I’ve seen in my life where I might have benefited from such consideration, so kudos on balance. The show is gracefully packed to the gills with representation. Nava Mau as Teri, Donny’s trans girlfriend, is very good, a fine performance and good chemistry with Gadd. Donny’s (and Gadd’s) confusions are more understandable than I can say—more understandable than I can imagine. Baby Reindeer is thoroughly entertaining—I really liked some parts of Donny’s stand-up routines, all figuratively drenched in flop sweat. But it is not an easy show to watch, as it touches deep chords and often feels like some invasive biopsy of emotion. I recommend it enthusiastically but be sure to heed the content warnings.