Kid A (2000)

It may be a little perverse, but if I had to stack-rank Radiohead albums Kid A would be #2 after only OK Computer. The context may be different. They’re playing different instruments, with different arrangements. But it’s still Radiohead—couldn’t, for example, “In Limbo” fit on practically any of their albums? But then there is the controversy, which I saw split two ways: 1) I knew people who were literally mad at Radiohead, thinking this album meant they had been played for fools somehow. It reminds me of the way people can be convinced David Lynch or the Coen brothers are mocking them personally in their movies. 2) Others went a different direction, mulishly declaring Kid A the best Radiohead album and the only one they liked even remotely. Which reminds me that I never did get around to the follow-up album from the same sessions, Amnesiac—just not interested enough—so I feel it’s fair to say I’m somewhat more in the middle. I like Kid A in the same way I like the others—in fragments of the songs, rarely entire songs, and apparently depending on my mood when I sit down to listen. Do the snow-capped mountain peaks and/or icebergs on the cover of Kid A give us a clue to what we’re in for? All Radiohead music is cold at some level. Lyrics and lead vocals by Thom Yorke are the usual enigmas, when they can even be made out. But there are high points to Kid A if you’re willing to let them come to you. “Everything in Its Right Place,” led by an electric piano that will be ubiquitous on this album, is not just a great opener but apparently also the most popular track on the album. “How to Disappear Completely” carries a strange and beautiful musical figure that comes creasing in to haunt you. It might be under some influence of Ennio Morricone. “The National Anthem” has trace elements of free jazz, “Optimistic” offers up a nice clanking disquieting groove, and “Motion Picture Soundtrack” sounds like it could be, notably given that guitarist Jonny Greenwood was about to embark on a Hollywood career providing movie scores. He started with 2003’s Bodysong and his credits, mostly working with director and writer Paul Thomas Anderson, include There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread, The Power of the Dog, and more. These guys have clearly got it busting out all over.

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)

USA, 288 minutes

Director/writer/photography/editor: Jonas Mekas

Music: Auguste Varkalis

With: Jonas Mekas, Hollis Melton, Oona Mekas, Sebastian Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Allen Ginsberg, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, Robert Breer

Jonas Mekas’s lengthy “diary film” from the turn of the century lasts nearly five hours, gathering up the home movies of his life from about the late ‘60s on and splicing them together with no obvious method or strategy, accompanied by bursts of voiceover. He explains at the beginning of the picture that even the thought of trying to organize all the material was overwhelming. He started out trying to do so but quickly gave it up. He managed to divide it into 12 chapters, but only Chapter Three, about his wedding, honeymoon, birth of Oona, his daughter ... and more, coheres his themes even remotely. He reports to us from his “little editing room,” usually late at night. All of it is amateurish—these are home movies, after all—even if Mekas was known as an experimental filmmaker (and poet, and artist). The sound, if it is even there, is often terrible, with inconsistent audio levels. The images are not much better than that. The camera shakes a lot and there are many, many cuts.

“You must, by now,” he says at the beginning of Chapter Five, 91 minutes in, speaking in his gravelly, measured Lithuanian accent, “come to a realization that what you are seeing is a sort of masterpiece of nothing. Nothing.” I was thinking that myself but at the same time it occurred to me that just previously he showed Oona’s first steps (to the accompaniment of the Velvet Underground’s “Run Run Run”). It’s arguable that first steps are profound in terms of human development. He captured that, even dwelt on it. It’s a beautiful moment. Then Mekas, at the beginning of Chapter Five, catches himself on the point. He speaks of the importance of those images of Oona’s first steps, emphasizing the word “importance.” He calls them “little moments of paradise.” It’s not the first or last time he will use the phrase—and, indeed, many others.

In Vanda’s Room (2000)

No Quarto da Vanda, Portugal / Germany / Switzerland, 171 minutes

Director / photography: Pedro Casta

Editors: Dominique Auvray, Patricia Saramago

Cast: Vanda Duarte, Lena Duarte, Zita Duarte, Manuel Gomes Miranda, Diogo Pires Miranda, Evangeline Nelas, Miquelina Barros, Antonio Semedo Moreno, Paulo Nunes, Paulo Jorge Goncalves, Pedro Lanban

Vanda Duarte—a real person played by herself (everyone here plays themselves)—is a heroin addict who spends most of her time in her room smoking and coughing. Others inject the drug (and/or cocaine) but we don’t see much of that with Vanda. She runs a lighter under a piece of foil with the powder on it, sucking up the smoke through a glass tube. We see a lot of that. She also spends much of the movie intermittently rolling up a skein of yarn into a ball. Like many scenes in this movie it is relaxing and boring by seemingly random turns. The most unlikely scenes—such as ongoing demolition captured by director and cinematographer Pedro Costa wandering the slum streets filming what crosses his field of vision—reduce us to a kind of mesmerized, numb staring.

Vanda’s room is in Fontainhas, a slum district of Lisbon, Portugal. And, technically, it’s probably not her room. She and most of these people are squatting in buildings designated for demolition, in blocks and neighborhoods designated for urban revitalization projects. There didn’t seem to be as many scenes of demolition as there seemed to be the first time I looked at this. The movie casts a certain hypnotic pall as it wanders its desolations. The scenes of demolition can be whining, banging, and loud, as construction usually is, but they can also take on ASMR qualities somehow. They’re often long and there is something inherently soothing about watching a machine methodically carry out its appointed destruction. Other times the racket is unbearable and annoying, like the movie at large.

Songs From the Second Floor (2000)

Sånger från andra våningen, Sweden / Norway / Denmark / France / Germany, 98 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Roy Andersson

Photography: Istvan Borbas, Jesper Klevenas

Music: Benny Andersson

Cast: Lars Nordh, Sten Andersson, Stefan Larsson, Torbjorn Fahlstrom, Lucio Vucina, Hanna Eriksson, Peter Roth, Tommy Johansson, Sture Olsson

As I get deeper into the aggregated critical roundup list of best 21st-century movies over at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? I find more and more movies and filmmakers that are new to me. A lot of them are generally more difficult than my perhaps entertainment-oriented values would like (hi Holy Motors, hi Tabu, hi Colossal Youth). I know now that Ari Aster, for one (and his mother too), has very high regard for Swedish director, writer, and editor Roy Andersson. But I had never really heard of Andersson in any meaningful way until the last year or two, when Songs From the Second Floor made a chart leap, up from several years in the range of #57 to #73 to its present position of #41. A friend (Steven Rubio aka Mon-Sewer Paul Regret) posted a review last fall that allowed Songs might be for others, but it wasn’t for him. Based on that, I put off looking at it for a first time last year, hoping it would fall again out of my reach. But no.

Thus I came to Songs with rock-bottom expectations (and this won’t be the last time this year!). Terms like “absurdist” and “existential” associated with Songs and Andersson did not help. But low expectations can sometimes be your friend if you can still bring yourself to look at something. Songs From the Second Floor is a loosely connected series of vignettes made out of single shots of long scenes that are indeed absurd. A stage magician starts to saw a volunteer from the audience in half—wounds him, actually. A parade of performative self-flagellants playing in the background of scenes creates a traffic jam that lasts for eight hours and more. A passenger choir on the subway erupts in song, like flash mobs can do now. A man has a son he says was driven insane by writing poetry. At least these scenes often have the virtue of being funny.

"Floating Bridge" (2000)

Having slept on it, I've decided to take Alice Munro's story as a dream sequence. There's even enough information to support specific points of context, though I understand I'm making leaps here. The dreamer is Jinny, the main character (and probably the narrator), but the dream is from a later time, after surviving the cancer that is described here. She survived it but her life, however grateful she may be, is inevitably fractured. In the dream (in my version), she is in a scene following a visit to the doctor where he told her her condition has begun to go into remission. Her husband Neal is making it impossible to talk to him. He is a strange and unsettling presence in this story—her husband, but as disconnected from her as it is possible to be. He drives her back from the doctor's appointment but won't interact with her directly, only talks at her and uses others as distraction. Especially in light of their age difference—she is 42 and he is 58—he behaves bizarrely. He has hired an entirely inappropriate home care assistant, Helen, a teen who is in the legal system. Everything he does in this story is more to accommodate Helen than Jinny. There's even a sense Neal is flirting with Helen. The detours they take on the way home from the doctor are weird and time-consuming. All the places this remarkable story goes are charged with shocking behavior, decisions, words said aloud. This floating bridge—how is it anything but a dream product? What's most vivid about the story is Jinny's will to live. She is right at death in every way, still in chemotherapy, still in the shock of the diagnosis. She knows it is close and seems to be considering resigning herself to it, but she resists too. The appearance of the adolescent Ricky brings a sexual charge, which jolts Jinny from merely wanting to resist death to finding the strength and reason to do it. Or that's how I read it. There's a crackling discomfort to this story that gnaws away at the reader, especially as we start to piece together the action and Jinny herself. People persist in not behaving naturally but only slightly out of key. Something always feels wrong though that might be a matter of witnessing the shabby way Jinny is treated, or dreams she was treated. It also seems a little too shabby. The story ends on a high note: "What she felt was a lighthearted compassion, almost like laughter. A swish of tender hilarity, getting the better of all her sores and hollows, for the time given." In my version that's her waking up.

In case it's not at the library.

On Writing (2000)

I haven't read that much Stephen King, maybe a half-dozen of his novels, but I have a real fondness for two nonfiction volumes: Danse Macabre, a critical horror overview, and this one, a writing manual and memoir with free-rolling digressions, rudely interrupted by a roadside accident that nearly killed him. King is obviously not entirely comfortable with the memoir side of the project, which he freely admits, but he still has an interesting and great by-the-bootstraps story. He's rich now but he wasn't always and his drive and work ethic are impressive. The writing guide part of this is less interesting, though I generally enjoy the exercise and agree with him on many things. He may be too much of a Strunk & White partisan for my taste. That little book is hugely entertaining but it's full of gaps and I don't always agree with its style judgments. See Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage for the real stuff. In terms of memoir, I like King's loyalty to his roots—all of them, from the horror and science fiction genres to working-class Maine. And I love his dedication to wide-ranging and eclectic reading. My favorite part of this book might be the recent reading list of novels and other books he offers that takes up several pages at the end. It has room for Peter Abrahams, Richard Bausch, Joseph Conrad, Kent Haruf, Annie Proulx, and scores more. I also appreciate his devotion to his wife, especially when he credits her and not writing for bringing him back from the accident. It just feels honest. You surely know where you are on Stephen King—don't we all, at this point (and also J.K. Rowling)? This is an essential stop if you like him and worth a look even if you know you don't. As always, my preconceptions betray me. I'm surprised to see a certified master of horror who appears to be such a model of emotional health. Edgar Allan Poe better fits my own sense of the role—disreputable, in ill health, dead early, like that. In many ways somehow Stephen King is the Bruce Springsteen of horror fiction—vastly talented, vastly generous, and, yes, a certain model of virtuous mental health. I'm actually not sure where I am on King as a writer at the moment. I used to think he was underrated, now I tend to think he's overrated. I stalled completely on his Dark Tower series of eight books after the first, and I notice his stuff rarely improves on second readings. That's the case for me even here. I read this and liked it a lot when it was newer, but reading again for this write-up I wasn't nearly as dazzled. Its best features were the comforts of shared worldviews, which in a way is enough in a memoir.

In case it's not at the library.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000)

Dave Eggers's specialty might be setting up shop in the gray areas of literature and then living there as if he were a natural. Maybe he is. His first book is a reasonably straightforward memoir, written and published in his late 20s. That's pretty young for a memoir, but Eggers already had a daunting life story to tell—both his parents died of cancer in the same year, when he was 21 and his youngest brother Toph was 8. Dave, Toph, and their sister Beth (with help from the eldest of the four siblings, Bill) moved to California and raised Toph while attempting to carry on their own young adult lives. But it probably wasn't the harrowing story that made Eggers and his book so popular in 2000. That likely had more to do with a natural talent for telling a story, filtered through a Gen X sensibility. In fact, it might be fair to call this a classic of Gen X literature, along with anything you'd care to name by Douglas Coupland, author of the term. Ironical self-consciousness is a primary feature confronting the reader. It starts with the title. Then there are elaborate instructions for how to read the book, along with sections of the book that were taken out presented with no context. Then it's on to the Acknowledgments, another lengthy section riffing on its own self-awareness and abusing book structure tics, e.g., "The author would like to acknowledge that he does not look good in red." After nearly a hundred pages, the text proper of the memoir finally begins. Two things enable Eggers to get away with all this, at least as much as he does. He doesn't always. But he is a good writer and his story has a sobering gravity that keeps it compelling. Both elements are necessary but in the end I'm more impressed with his writing. He is somehow warm and generous even as he is cold and calculating, willing to test his sincerity in the crucible of your skepticism as much as it takes. Perhaps because he is literally the first to doubt his own sincerity. He is a weird combination of genuinely modest and raging egotist. I was sad to hear his troubles did not end with those recounted in the book. A year or two after it was published his sister killed herself. He hasn't written much about his family since. The book does not live up to the title, of course, but it's good enough to pal around with the idea.

In case it's not at the library.

All That You Can't Leave Behind (2000)

The other day I was shopping in one of my local hypermarket superstores, filling my basket with the usual weird motley of groceries, linens, hardware, and clothes, when I noticed familiar music playing. Why, my goodness, it was a song from the very album I was preparing to write about—"Beautiful Day," from U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind. This led me to look it up and realize that the song had been a #21 hit at the end of 2000, which led me to further marvel over the band's surprisingly substantial entry in my circa 2009 Billboard book: 16 hits to that point, six top 10s, two #1s. I knew they had become crass sellouts to every audience they ever had, except maybe Jann Wenner, but I hadn't realized how far it went. I had been mulling over a defense of All That You Can't Leave Behind because over the years it has shaped up as my answer to the party question, What is your favorite U2 album after all? But now in this citadel of consumerism, fortified later by those refreshed chart statistics of the past, it sounded so disconcertingly apt that it all started to collapse in front of me. Clearly the song belongs more now to the layered shared memories of the Billboard hit parade over the decades, and at 18 years old this year it's just old enough to feel a little instantly stale. In fact, I admit that was my reaction when I played the album for the first time in years a few weeks ago. I kind of flinched at it a little. By the third time through, a few days later, all the elements of warmth reassembled and I found myself looking forward again to hearing it regularly. Is it a case of self-fulfilling prophecy? "Beautiful Day" was not just the only (relatively modest) hit but it also opens the album, a kind of corollary to the Beatles' "Good Day Sunshine" to start side 2 of Revolver. Very sweet, in other words, just this side of saccharine, but an effective mood-setter for a nice batch of anthems. In the case of U2 it is some kind of moral sugar rush—the song titles tell a story too, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," "Elevation," "Peace on Earth," "When I Look at the World," finishing on "Grace"—but once it's familiar it gets to be comforting. I did love this album in its time, taking it as the band's welcome (if meditated) retreat from nearly 10 years of incessant "pop" posturing and return to a certain soulfulness they always had that appealed to me (in retrospect, more and more, I have to ask myself what was my problem again with The Joshua Tree? ... for another time). All That You Can't Leave Behind also later became one of the side anthems of 9/11, as the song "New York" was so poignant in the historical moment and brought the album back for me for another fall and winter. And now this fall and winter, at home, in my car if I want to use the CD player, and even in what passes for shopping malls these days. God bless us every one for all that we can't leave behind.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

Denmark / Spain / Germany / Netherlands / Italy / USA / UK / France / Sweden / Finland / Iceland / Norway, 140 minutes
Director/writer: Lars von Trier
Photography: Robby Muller
Music: Bjork
Editors: Francois Gedigier, Molly Marlene Stensgaard
Cast: Bjork, David Morse, Catherine Deneuve, Peter Stormare, Cara Seymour, Joel Grey, Vincent Paterson, Jean-Marc Barr, Vladica Kostic, Udo Kier, Zeljko Ivanek, Siobhan Fallon Hogan

On one sardonic level, it's all too possible to take this mordant plum as director and writer Lars von Trier's homage to The Sound of Music. Dancer in the Dark, after all, celebrates all musicals and that musical specifically as just about the one dim source of light in a narrative trajectory that hurtles vertiginously toward darkness. Iceland singer/songwriter, pop experimentalist, and charming weirdo Bjork capably plays Selma Jezkova, a Czech immigrant to the US, who is living and working a factory job in Washington state in the mid-'60s. She's a single mother, and she is going blind from a congenital disease. She is living in a rented space and friendly with the couple she rents from. Her one aim in life is to save the money for a surgical procedure that will prevent her son from going blind in turn—he has inherited the same condition from her.

What's that got to do with The Sound of Music? Glad you asked. Selma loves musicals and for most of this movie is rehearsing the part of Maria in a community production of the venerable lumbering Rodgers & Hammerstein chestnut. Its songs are interwoven into the action, wryly commenting on it at points. It's easy to miss its pervasive lurking presence because it's overshadowed by the numerous outbreaks of Bjork videos. Typically enough for von Trier, Dancer in the Dark is a movie that is going to two extremes at once (emphasis on "extreme"): a heartbreaking story of a victim of soulless predators, call it a '50s style woman's picture, and a musical which reserves all rights for playful fantasy. The result is bewildering, to say the least.

Platform (2000)

Zhantai, Hong Kong / China / Japan / France, 154 minutes
Director/writer: Zhangke Jia
Photography: Nelson Lik-wai Yu
Music: Yoshihiro Hanno
Editor: Jinlei Kong
Cast: Hongwei Wong, Tao Zhao, Jing Dong Liang, Tian-yi Yang, Bo Wang

The first time I sat down to look at Platform, earlier this year, I came away with a germ of an impression that it is something on the order of an Asian Fame. My Halliwell's (2008 edition) dismisses it as mediocre, with zero stars, complaining about the overuse of long shots. Zero stars in that system is not as bad as it sounds, but it's not good. Watching Platform, I glazed over, I admit. I was watching it from the perspective of an ongoing long-term self-imposed obligation, attempting to track down and write up the highest-ranking entrants on the list of 21st-century movies at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? For the four years I have been aware of the list, it has been remarkably volatile. This is not that surprising, given the relatively small sample size and brief time to assimilate, and indeed it's one of the most interesting features of that list. It has rewritten its top 10 by half in my time of following the annual updates.

Platform has been steady at #17 since 2013. It spent 2011 and 2012 in the 40s, and before that, for the first two years of the list, it was over 100. I suspect the primary source of its high regard lies with a 2005 review by Jonathan Rosenbaum in which he labels it "one of the greatest of all Chinese films" but I can't explain how that has anything to do with the recent surges of support. I appreciate many of the disparate pieces of Platform—the burnishing of its central metaphor, the use of pop music, the sense of time and place—but for the most part I flail to find meaningful connecting points, beyond the generic anomie, which I can always get behind at least a little. I found a nice appreciation of it by Joel Bocko at the Wonders in the Dark blog. I won't be able to give it anywhere near as thoughtful of a treatment.

The Gleaners and I (2000)

Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, France, 82 minutes, documentary
Director / writer: Agnes Varda
Photography: Didier Doussin, Stephane Krausz, Didier Rouget, Pascal Sautelet, Agnes Varda
Music: Joanna Bruzdowicz, Isabelle Olivier
Editors: Laurent Pineau, Agnes Varda

The themes in Agnes Varda's turn-of-the-century documentary are equal parts modern-day and ancient, focused on life and waste. Varda sports a digital camera, learning the ways of the technology, complete with snazzy effects (and a goof or two). The picture is concerned on obvious levels with stewardship of the planet and our fellow beings. And it is also about the olden practice of gleaning, scouring fields after harvests for the leftovers that would otherwise be abandoned and rot. A pedantic legal scholar appears at one point, wearing his finery and waving around a red-bound copy of the local penal code, quoting from it, explaining the legalities of gleaning, which have developed over the centuries in France. It is considered a kind of public charity, and apparently grants open access even to private lands, under specific conditions, for the practice.

It's not the only kind of gleaning in this documentary, but it's what Varda shows us first, with a potato field that has been harvested yet still yields hundreds of pounds—many potatoes rejected because they are too big, or the wrong shape, or just because the machinery missed them. Varda spots a heart-shaped potato and claims it for herself, hunting for more, which she puts in a basket and brings home and displays. Then, as this brief film opens up, we see the more modern styles of gleaning, in urban environments, in public markets before and after hours, at informal drop-off / trading sites, with dumpster diving explained and demonstrated, and beyond that suggestions of estate sales, thrift stores, and collecting. Gleaning is an old and even honorable way to get by, and one I can respond to personally as a lifelong consumer of gently used fare.

The Last Dance (2000)

So, yeah, this is helping to answer my questions about the end of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which wasn't his real name either)—not bad, but maybe a little tired. As it happens, this is also a milestone in the series, the 50th book, so perhaps McBain was unusually up for it. The main case is a pretty good tale of murder for greed. Fat Ollie Weeks has more than ever become a character of interest, and generally that's for the good. He represents an adroit balance of loathsome and fascinating. Lots of nice touches here such as some misdirection about Houston, Texas, or the Broadway-style panache of a stage show producer and his minions. I'm not sure I hear the same hum and crackle of earlier titles, but it's still plenty serviceable as a procedural thriller. Multiple bodies are involved, the cruelty is wanton but comes in a variety of styles. I love the feeling of Isola as an alternative universe New York City that somehow exists with New York City in this world, though little is said (that I've seen or recall) about New York in detail. Steve Carella feels a little tired or exhausted. They all do, a little, those left. I was particularly happy to see Law & Order referenced, as I was curious about his take. It seems to be a favorite of at least two characters, the longstanding Bert Kling and his love interest, a highly accomplished African-American surgeon liaison with the police, Sharyn Cooke. One of the detectives is shot and injured. But that and the Kling thread do feel a little pro forma. So overall maybe a B+ for this one, upped a notch simply for making it to 50 in reasonably good style.

In case it's not at the library.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

Wo hu cang long, Taiwan / Hong Kong / USA / China, 120 minutes
Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Du Lu Wang, Hui-Ling Wang, James Schamus, Kuo Jung Tsai
Photography: Peter Pau
Music: Dun Tan
Editor: Tim Squyres
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi, Chang Chen, Lung Sihung, Cheng Pei-pei, Li Fazeng, Gao Xian, Hai Yan, Wang Deming, Li Li

Director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—a project of love if ever there was one—still sits comfortably high on the list of 21st-century films at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, some 14 years on. But it seems every time I see this valentine to Lee's origins I like it a little less. Equal parts old-fashioned Hollywood potboiler, newfangled martial arts epic, overindulgent fairy tale, and great swooning romance (make that two great swooning romances), it shows among other things how deeply Lee had embraced the aesthetic of Oscar-bait even then, with its expensive color tones and crane shots, its impressive roster of Asian stars, and its clockwork alternations between ponderous exposition and gripping action scenes.

For balance, for fans, here is Richard Corliss of Time outlining the appeal: "The director convened stars of three movie eras—pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the 1960s, Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen—and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on treetops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative, and it kicks ass."

On the Rez (2000)

The "Rez" in Ian Frazier's second book about his travels on the Great Plains of North America is the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, which famously is among the most impoverished regions of the country. Le War Lance, Frazier's Native American friend he met on the streets of New York City (as detailed in Great Plains), takes an even more central role in this rambling and always interesting collection of facts and anecdotes. Frazier makes it sound as if Le is always pressing him for money. But Frazier gets something in return, as he reveals in one telling moment near the end. Le and his friend Floyd John have once again beaten Frazier out of rides and cash as they attempt to repair an ailing car. Frazier writes: "On his back under the car, Floyd John wrenched and tapped. At the side of the house, Gunner, the dog, growled away at a section of deer ribs Le had thrown her. Two kittens, one yellow and one black, chased each other around. A warm wind blew. For a moment, we might have been sitting in front of a tipi in an Oglala camp along the North Platte River 150 years ago, braiding lariats and making arrows and gazing off across the Plains." It's not that Frazier entertains and can express such a fantasy, but that he does so even in the face of all the disturbing news he has to tell about the Rez. Maybe it's the only way he can bear the reality, which is here. It's bad, and he knows it, and there's more than 100 pages of notes sourcing it all. It is heartening and yet enormously sad, enormously sad and yet heartening, to read these stories of the Oglala Sioux and the life at Pine Ridge. It's mostly bad news but not all. He finds a hero he can believe in in a teen girls' basketball player named SuAnne Big Crow. And the pathos of his plain love for the Oglala, which does verge on obsessive, is always most apparent. For me, I like how it works as a kind of sequel to Great Plains, so focused on a palpable sense of place, if here focused even more, almost exclusively, on the modern-day reservation. He continually makes it come alive in totally unexpected ways.

In case it's not at the library.

Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the '90s (2000)

If Amazon reviews and general word of mouth over more than a decade are any indication, this is widely agreed to be the least of rock critic dean Robert Christgau's consumer guide books. Everyone complains about the byzantine grading schema, with its confusing array of letter grades, stars, and symbology, among which are numerous overlaps and counterintuitive distinctions (viz., turkey v. bomb). But the main problem is elucidated by Christgau himself, in the introduction: "The factoid I latched onto, a possible fabrication that's tres poetic regardless, was that between 1988 and 1998 the number of recordings released annually increased tenfold, to something like 35,000. Even if the 35,000 included a whole lot of singles, which as near as I could tell it didn't, this would mean that there was more music recorded than there were hours in the year—quite possibly twice as much." Me, I have always pinpointed the early '90s as the time when my tastes began to diverge from Christgau, who until then had been a reliable arbiter, albeit with the usual quirks and oddities that come from such work (he presently has a mysterious problem with David Bowie, for example). Just a few years ago the difficulty was thrown into relief when I made a long-term project of picking up as much of his top 10s as I could from his annual "Dean's List," which has so far continued without interruption since 1974 (plus there's one for 1971). I already had many of the albums until approximately 2002, of course, many of them my own favorites too over the years. This was more about filling in the gaps and getting up to date. The result was a little discouraging—a sense he had become more unreliable for me. I heard a good deal of wonderful African music that was new to me, but on other fronts it felt like a kind of samey-ness had settled in at some point: Fountains of Wayne, the Mountain Goats, Randy Newman, Liz Phair, John Prine, Loudon Wainwright, even my beloved Sonic Youth, became way overrepresented in shuffle play, beyond anything that held up even to passing scrutiny, while others with some or very much merit by my lights (notably in the '90s) were slighted, misread, or entirely missing in action: Beulah, Catherine Wheel, Consolidated, House of Love, Lush, Mudhoney, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, Primal Scream, Ride, and the Wedding Present. These are all matters of taste, of course, and as the old saw has it, a critic can't get to everything—especially when the new saw is that there is more music released every year than there are hours in the year. Discrimination sets in out of necessity, making matters of taste even more crucial in this line of work. That ultimately leaves this particular book at some distance from being a useful consumer guide. Christgau's writing is still in fine form when he stretches out and talks to us awhile, as in the introduction. But more often the language itself is compressed to the point of cramping and distortion, held too close to account to the grading system. I couldn't read through and through this as I had with the first two. And there's the matter of taste. My own is that this should be approached and/or used with caution.

In case it's not at the library. (Better yet, his website.)

A Vast Conspiracy (2000)

I guess I can start this by noting I don't care much for Jeffrey Toobin's incarnation as a TV beltway pundit, at least not since the coming of Bush/Cheney. He was a little better in the Clinton era, but has always displayed too much of that "going along to get along" ethos that so pervades DC media culture. I know, you have to do what you have to do, and if Toobin didn't do it he wouldn't be there at all to annoy me. There's the rub when it comes to cable news. All that said, however, I think this is basically a solid job of journalism and thus a more or less essential primer on the whole Whitewater contretemps, which eventually became the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to the impeachment of a sitting president, prosecuted by handfuls of serial adulterers. The impeachment of Bill Clinton at a historical moment when the unregulated economy had begun to metastasize and terrorists abroad had declared war on us struck me even then, without benefit of such perspective, as the most irresponsible instance of governance I had seen in my life. Then came Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq War II, Katrina, and finally the economic collapse of 2008, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and Mitt Romney. I suppose you can make a case that other political crimes are worse, but the foolish recklessness of Republicans in attempting to take down a president who was too inconveniently popular (and who was all the while implementing their favorite policies) nonetheless happens to mark my own political reawakening, such as it is. This was bad stuff that was going on, acts of political depravity that don't fall far short of treason, to evoke one of their favorite terms. Certainly it shows continuing lack of faith in the country's most sacred document by definition, the Constitution. Toobin does a good job of laying out the whole story here, one I found myself reliving painfully as I read. It made me sad and it made me angry, and even though my personal inclination for sympathy toward Bill Clinton has fallen away in the years since, it comes back any time I review the facts of this excruciating episode. It was wrong what happened here, and there's no evidence that the long national nightmare it arguably started (with the Newt Gingrich class of '94 House) is even close to being finished yet. Chris Christie, for example, is still no idle threat (though hopeful about latest scandal, too soon to tell).

In case it's not at the library.

Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)

Werckmeister harmóniák, Hungary/Italy/Germany/France, 145 minutes
Directors: Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Writers: Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Bela Tarr, Peter Dobai, Gyuri Dosa Kiss, Gyorgy Feher
Photography: Patrick de Ranter, Miklos Gurban, Erwin Lanzensberger, Gabor Medvigy, Emil Novak, Rob Tregenza
Music: Mihaly Vig
Editor: Agnes Hranitzky
Cast: Lars Rudolph, Peter Fitz, Hanna Schygulla, Janos Derzsi, Djoko Rosic, Peter Dobai

Werckmeister Harmonies is the usual study in contradictions for a long and difficult art film, or at least for one that grows better with familiarity—bewildering but mesmerizing, confusing but lucid, slow and ponderous yet frequently nimble-witted. It opens on a strange and elaborately staged barroom demonstration of an eclipse, with drunkards standing in as the heavenly bodies. It finds its narrative focus (around which it stalks sideways fashion) in the arrival of a traveling circus, so called, to a small city. The circus features a whale exhibit and "The Prince," some sort of charismatic cult figure. The town, seen mostly through the eyes of its overnight newspaper delivery person and would-be litterateur Janos (Lars Rudolph and his haunting, fearful face), is in fragile condition, wracked by unknown forces politically, emotionally, existentially.

These elements are as carefully chosen as everything else in this movie, which is nearly as deliberate as it is possible to be. Whales carry portent that stretches back to the bible, revived again in the advent of the New World. "The Prince"—who is likely the strangest and most mysterious character in a movie stuffed with them—grounds it deeply in European experience, bearing the colossal burden of everything from Machiavelli and Saint-Exupery to the feudal estate itself. In many ways the opening scene works as prologue, because the narrative arc, such as it is, most closely resembles an eclipse, the single most cinematic natural event that occurs (aside from perhaps only tornadoes), ending at that moment Janos himself describes in his barroom exposition: "Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the moon swims away...."

Traffic (2000)

Germany/USA, 147 minutes
Director/photography: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Simon Moore, Stephen Gaghan
Music: Cliff Martinez
Editor: Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Michael Douglas, Benicio Del Toro, Don Cheadle, Luiz Guzman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Dennis Quaid, Erika Christensen, Topher Grace, Amy Irving, Albert Finney, Clifton Collins Jr., Tomas Milian, James Brolin, Steven Bauer, Miguel Ferrer, D.W. Moffett, Peter Riegert, Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Viola Davis, John Slattery

However permanent it may or may not turn out to be, Steven Soderbergh's scheduled exile from filmmaking has motivated me to pile on his surprisingly big output as a director (and editor, and cinematographer) and do some catching up. He has had his prolific periods. Traffic, which I saw when it was new, was a part of a rush of work he released at the turn of the century, with The Limey (still my one favorite by him, despite its unfortunate influence), Erin Brockovich, and Ocean's Eleven, all released within a year or two of one another.

Traffic may be the most self-consciously "serious" of them, pretty close when all is said and done to what used to be called a "message picture." The societal issue under discussion is public policy on recreational drugs, and the message is "the War on Drugs is not working." It helps that I am heartened to see the issue taken on and that message delivered, but it helps even more that the movie, though not without flaws, is also a pleasure to watch, a great big snack cake of a movie, with a relaxed confidence about knowing what it is and what it can and cannot do, packed full of memorable performances, and deftly managing the subtleties and nuances not just of the characters and their interactions, but perhaps more importantly (for me, in this instance) of the sensitive, complex, and explosive issue at its core.

Kirsty MacColl, "Here Comes That Man Again" (2000)

(listen)

I know most of us are still not prepared to talk freely about cybersex among ourselves, but 13 years ago the late Kirsty MacColl gave it a perfectly charming, lighthearted whirl. It's fully marinated in the Cuban sounds and rhythms that mark the album it comes from, Tropical Brainstorm (see also). It's dated, to be sure, lurching out of what suddenly now appear to be more innocent times, the late '90s. You don't hear modem tones so much anymore, for one thing, and "get your rocks off" goes back even further to the era of "humping." But this shticky number sketches the screaming weirdness with almost clinical precision, sighing contentedly at one point, "Who'd have thought I'd have so much fun ... I never knew I had it in me." She always treads lightly, but seems to have the basics right: "oops, another file on the email, oh oh-oh ohh," so on so forth. The compulsion, the payoffs, the many surprises, not all good. It's extremely silly, nearly as silly as it is intoxicating, thus a topic perfectly suited to her style of songwriting. Through the swirl of rhythms and arrangement, broad sound gags bubble up and charge the energy, such as a wacky muted trumpet that serves as ba-da-boom for one of the punch lines. There's a Monica Lewinsky joke too, in the thick of the big finish, which lets loose with a tattoo of "sha la la la la, get your rocks off baby." This may or may not be my favorite song by Kirsty MacColl but everything I like about her is in it: it's equally funny and poignant and fearless, and musically it's Tin Pan Alley sophisticated with an eye on the rest of the world and winning popcraft all the way.

Yi Yi (2000)

A One and a Two, Taiwan/Japan, 173 minutes
Director/writer: Edward Yang
Photography: Wei-han Yang
Music: Kai-Li Peng
Editor: Bo-Wen Chen
Cast: Nien-Jen Wu, Issei Ogata, Elaine Jin, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang, Hsi-Sheng Chen, Su-Yun Ko, Shu-shen Hsiao, Adriene Lin, Pang Chang Yu

Don't act surprised, but I'm having a hard time translating "yi yi" based on hasty Internet searches. Good old Wikipedia tells me that "yi" means "one" and "yi yi" means "'one one,' in the sense of 'each one,'" whatever that means. It goes on to mention that the Chinese characters for it (一一), when vertically aligned, mean "two" (which at least helps explain the off-point British adaptation of the title, A One and a Two). Thus, the best I can make out is that it may be an idiom describing an aspirational level of spiritual integration, a oneness. At least, that happens to be the very state that every single person occupying this vast picture of small family drama (not to mention you and me) yearns for every minute of their waking lives.

In fact, with these insights, I find it helpful now to remember the old joke about the Buddhist monk who encounters a hot-dog vendor and places his order: "Make me one with everything." Set in modern Taipei, Taiwan, a city of some 3 million, it's that profound human yearning as much as anything—I mean for spiritual integration, not hot dogs—that drives the poignant complexity of this deeply meditated story of an extended middle-class family coping with death and life and meaning in a modernized Western society. It's charming, provoking, sad, and lovely by turns, with the deceptively placid feel of a Lifetime movie whenever the music starts to play (I say that as someone who appreciates Lifetime movies, but don't worry, the music doesn't play that often). It's nearly three hours, with a host of complicated characters and interrelations, but it goes down easy, as one simply enters into this life, immediately engrossed even if it is ultimately mostly uneventful.