Millennium Mambo (2001)

Qian xi man bo, Taiwan / France, 106 minutes

Director: Hsiao-Hsien Hou

Writer: T'ien-wen Chu

Photography: Ping Bin Lee

Music: Yoshihiro Hanno, Kai-yu Huang, Giong Lim

Editors: Ju-kuan Hsiao, Ching-Sung Liao

Cast: Shu Qi, Chun-hao Tuan, Jack Kao, Jun Takeuchi, Ko Takeuchi, Doze Niu, Pauline Chan, Rio Peng

This confusing but beautiful and often striking picture is the first I’ve seen by Taiwanese director Hsiao-Hsien Hou. My points to follow may thus (actually, as always) say more about me than the movie or any of its principals. It was released in 2001, and it is set in 2001 (perhaps to avoid arguments about which millennium the year 2000 belongs to), but the premise is that the events are memories of the main character, Vicky (Shu Qi), 10 years later, in 2011. It dwells in the Taipei rave scene, rife with drugs and lowlifes, crime, bad relationships. Vicky and her boyfriend, the overbearingly abusive Hao-Hao (Chun-hao Tuan), live together in a dump. They do drugs and try to get by. She works as a hostess in a popular night spot. They circle one another warily. They are never at ease together.

In a way it did not surprise me to learn that Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai were first offered the roles. Millennium Mambo reminded me a lot of the pictures of Wong Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love, Chungking Express) and even more of Hou’s countrymen Edward Yang (Yi Yi, A Brighter Summer Day) and Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?). The camera is liquid, often in motion, images may be out of focus, amounting only to blotches of color, though often vivid and always expressive. The pace is slow, studied, deliberate. Hao-Hao is some kind of DJ, and EDM is a pulsing constant, even in the background as if from the next apartment. In Millennium Mambo—in many of these pictures—the style is in direct opposition to the terms of the narrative, which is explicitly, even wantonly, focused on squalor. As cognitive dissonance it is exquisite.

United States of Trance (2001)

I’ve always been a little confused about how to think of albums like this. The major credit goes to a DJ—in this case the prolific Christopher Lawrence—who produces and/or remixes tracks by different artists. Contributing artists get so little credit that I was momentarily uncertain which were artist names and which were track names. On Lawrence’s Wikipedia page, United States of Trance is categorized with “DJ Compilations” (as opposed to “Albums,” “Singles & EPs,” or “Remixes”). OK, that sounds good. I somewhat crudely perhaps classify the genre with these exercises as “techno” at large. But hold up now, “trance” has its own meaning, which is fairly specific (again Wikipedia): “... typically characterized by a tempo between 120 and 150 beats per minute (BPM), repeating melodic phrases and a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in 1 to 2 ‘peaks’ or ‘drops.’” Yes, all right, good to know. Moving on: “Although trance is a genre of its own, it liberally incorporates influences from other musical styles such as techno, house, chill-out, classical music, tech house, ambient and film scores.” A lot of styles in that list I would call “techno” and be done with it—I can’t shave hairs that fine. I have my suspicions that making such distinctions requires doses of stimulant drugs, which I imagine also go excellently with a set like this one here, beguilingly lurching and percolating and driving forward for nearly 74 minutes. I will note that the 12 tracks by 12 different artists (including one by Lawrence) are all largely instrumentals, with some occasional whispering or non-word vocalizations. They are largely matters of simple musical figures with unexpected tones and complex rhythms. They are thrilling and dull as your mood may dictate. Per the definition above, each track does indeed have its peaks and/or drops, although that does not exactly apply to the album as a whole, which chugs along in its established parameters modulating groove and finally goes out unbowed at the end, like a brass band parade disappearing down the street. You wouldn’t necessarily know it’s 12 artists. It’s less a collection of songs and more a collection of dramatic musical moments. What’s more, the album tracks seamlessly—that is, playing it on shuffle produces awkward and abrupt transitions from track to track. It’s not the same. Lawrence intends it to be listened to as sequenced. For me it is music that too often wants to recede into the background. It’s hard to stay focused. Another word might be boring, but I would not go that far. United States of Trance is more like an environment that you visit, as a kind of tourist. You may not absorb it all, but you come away with distinct memories and experiences.

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

New Zealand / USA / UK, 228 minutes

Director: Peter Jackson

Writers: J.R.R. Tolkien, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson

Photography: Andrew Lesnie

Music: Howard Shore

Editor: John Gilbert

Cast: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Peter Jackson

A friend once told me he thought director and cowriter Peter Jackson seemed intent and focused on “going after the whales,” by which I think he meant the biggest and most popular film subjects available: eight or nine hours on one part of the Beatles’ career ... a complex restoration of World War I footage ... the Nth King Kong picture. And, of course, arguably the greatest fantasy property of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings (Jackson would unfortunately later show his predilections for bloat in his adaptation of The Hobbit, which ran about as long as his treatment of the trilogy, though it’s by far the shortest of the four novels).

Until The Lord of the Rings Jackson was something of a schlockmeister, tucked away Down Under in New Zealand and Australia, lobbing gore and chuckles in the spectacles of 1987’s Bad Taste and 1992’s Dead Alive. He had transition movies in the ‘90s, notably the exquisite and disturbing Heavenly Creatures along with the mockumentary Forgotten Silver. We can see better now that everything before The Lord of the Rings was the work of a craftsman who was very good and getting better at making movies—and had the making of this movie specifically in mind. But was anyone prepared for Jackson taking on something of the scope and ambition of adapting Tolkien’s classic quest tale, complete with Middle Earth elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, and other creatures of the ancient Anglo-Saxon imagination? It is something Jackson wanted to do all his life and I, for one, was frankly amazed to see him get the opportunity. But he did and he made the most of it.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

La pianiste, France / Austria / Germany, 131 minutes

Director: Michael Haneke

Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek

Photography: Christian Berger

Music: Franz Schubert

Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel

The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.

There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.

Blue Blood (2001)

Blue Blood was released in the same year as James Blood Ulmer’s epic collaboration with Willie Dixon and Vernon Reid, Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (recorded at Sun Studio in Memphis). Blue Blood is a collaboration with Bill Laswell, Bernie Worrell, and Amina Claudine Myers. Less concerned with Memphis bloodlines, inevitably it is also less fiery. What surprised me was a religious note running through much of it that left me wondering whether Ulmer is an avowed Christian (as opposed to the more general “spiritual person”). In album opener “O Gentle One,” an Ulmer song, he declares, “I believe in God and all of his creatures” and goes on to provide detail: “He’s the one, the only one.... He made the heavens and the Earth, in six days and nights. He made me, and you. Ain’t that out of sight?” Two songs later, on “99 Names,” he is back at the work of exalting the Lord. I didn’t count them, it might actually be 99, but it’s stuff like the Absolver, the Conqueror, the Restorer, the Provider, the One and Only Merciful and Compassionate King, etc. We’re talking about the Bible God again and even more specifically our old friend the jealous Old Testament God. Blue Blood is just altogether more pious than I expected from the guy doing Memphis sessions with the actual breathing Willie Dixon that same year, but maybe it just goes to show ... something. I see I picked up this CD at a used-CD place I used to frequent. The Bible God theme recurs often in Blue Blood in many ways, but not exclusively or even overbearingly. Some references are more subtle than others. To be clear, I don’t hear “O Gentle One” as subtle. Many of these songs have little if anything to do with God, some are at least mostly instrumental, and finally this album is approximately as warm as I’ve ever heard Ulmer. He is still found rumbling in with his electric guitar flashes of musical bent barbed wire, as on “As It Is.” He offers up a sweltering luxurious turn on “On and On.” And “Momentarily” is a lighthearted romp on a gorgeous soaring melody. Heartfelt pleas for unity on “We Got to Get Together” are made more bitingly sincere with lines like “I’ve seen my people kicked in the face,” not letting anyone off the hook yet for purposes of unity. It’s a funny interesting mixed bag we get from Ulmer in Blue Blood, and one I’ve been more inclined to listen to over the Memphis sessions, for whatever reason. Worth a try, I’d say.

La Ciénaga (2001)

Argentina / France / Spain / Japan, 103 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Hugo Colace

Editor: Santiago Ricci
Cast: Graciela Borges, Mercedes Moran, Martin Adjemian, Andrea Lopez, Leonora Balcarce, Sofia Bertolotto, Juan Cruz Bordeu, Silvia Bayle, Diego Baenas

“La ciénaga” translates from Spanish as “the swamp,” a title used in Canada for this picture as well as for global promotion. But it was released in the US as La Ciénaga, reasons unclear, perhaps for concerns it might be confused with horror pictures like The Fog or The Mist or maybe Swamp Thing movies. Director and writer Lucrecia Martel’s first film might be suitable as horror, in a way, but it is more focused formally on the swampy, undifferentiated mix of personalities in big families, two of which are featured. As IMDb puts it, in one of the more laconic film summaries I’ve seen, “The life of two women and their families in a small provincial town of Salta, Argentina.” Salta may be provincial but it is also the medium-sized city (ca. 600,000 today) where Martel was born and raised.

La Ciénaga is not an easy movie—the first time I looked at it took two separate sessions to finish and even then I wasn’t sure what the picture was supposed to be. Did it just catch me in the wrong mood? A couple more tries have clarified some of its murky points (as murky if nothing else) and in general the picture seems to get better with some familiarity and close study. It offers up a swirling style of narrative (“swirling,” one of my favorite adjectives), an equally liquid, probing camera, and a big cast with many small notes. But you’ll have to decide for yourself what kind of recommendation that is. I tend to greet such evaluations with skepticism myself. Maybe it would help if I listed all the honors and awards it has received, from film festivals in Berlin, Chicago, Havana, and elsewhere—or maybe that would be equally off-putting. If I have to say whether it’s worth seeing, I can only say yes, cautiously.

Amélie (2001)

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, France / Germany, 122 minutes

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Writers: Guillaume Laurant, Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Photography: Bruno Delbonnel

Music: Yann Tiersen

Editor: Hervé Schneid
Cast: Audrey Tautou, André Dussollier, Rufus, Mathieu Kassovitz, Maurice Bénichou, Urbain Cancelier, Artus de Penguern, Dominique Pinon, Isabel Nanty, Serge Merlin, Lorella Cravotta, Claire Maurier

The title character in Amélie is a humble young Parisian woman who works as a waitress. She is played in warm style by Audrey Tautou. Amélie is shy and introverted. She lost her mother in a somewhat comical episode when she was still a child. Now her father is remote and preoccupied with his hobbies. In the busy opening, the picture races through introductions to many of its many characters, with a voiceover narrator (André Dussollier) offering a litany of things they like and don’t like. We learn, for example, that one character’s cat “likes overhearing children’s stories.” Amélie likes watching old movies and noticing details no one else sees (there’s an example from Jules and Jim), but she hates when people driving in these pictures don’t keep an eye on the road (that’s an older Hollywood picture with Spencer Tracy). Amélie is a romantic with little interest in sex. “Instead,” Dussollier tells us, “she cultivates a taste for small pleasures. Dipping her hand into sacks of grain [at the market], cracking creme brulee with a teaspoon [accompanied by some very satisfying ASMR], and skipping stones at Canal Saint-Martin.”

Amélie finds her calling when she discovers a box of keepsakes kept by a boy and hidden years before in the wall of her apartment. She sets out to find the owner and return it to him. It takes some effort and detective work (and more charming characters along the way) but she finally manages it, in a strangely elaborate manner that is quite moving for the recipient. At that point, Amélie starts pursuing many more of these elaborate pranks which would be so hard to pull off in any other setting except a light-hearted romantic comedy movie. Fortunately, that’s basically what we have here, and not a bad one.

Is This It (2001)

I’m not sure why the title of this Strokes album, which comes in the form of a question, has no question mark. Do you know why. Nor can I guess why it holds back the sequencing of my favorite song here, “The Modern Age,” for second position, which means sitting through the beguiling singalong but slow title song to get to the proper kickoff. Once there, all good. This 35-minute raveup (an ideal album length, note) zooms and zips all over the place with crackling energy, vocals recorded through some megaphone filter. It is irresistible 2 guitars bass drums business. Turn it up. The Strokes, most of them NYC natives, hit first in January 2001 with the EP The Modern Age (darn right featuring my favorite), which triggered buzz and a bidding war among labels. This RCA / Rough Trade debut came out that summer. It made them darlings of the moment, though they were never able to follow up so effectively again. Interesting historical fact: the original release had a song called “New York City Cops” that was later replaced with “When It Started” due to sensitivities over the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I’m happy to report the new song does not appear to be about the War on Terror. Nothing from Is This It ever charted mainstream but the Strokes took a shot on three singles—“Hard to Explain,” “Last Nite,” and “Someday”—which did well on indie charts, especially in the UK. “Hard to Explain” arrives as the eighth track on the album, by which time the prevailing groove is well established, so much so that they can insert a relatively lengthy moment of silence and never miss a beat of your bobbing head. Fun anecdote: a young friend of mine (already a Strokes fan) was visiting New York in the summer of 2001 and one day, sitting in a public space, heard some music by the Strokes he did not know. Inquiring about it, he was somewhat viciously scolded because it was the Velvet Underground that was playing. Me, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all to be confused with the Velvets. Is This It may fairly be reduced to “I’m Waiting for the Man” with extra megaphone filters, but I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. This groove kicks hard and it kicks still. Also, the cover art is spectacularly beautiful.

Monsters, Inc. (2001)

So in September I decided to subscribe to Disney because all signs were that a movie I wanted to look at was there (Amelie), but then when I did subscribe in October it was already gone. Why do streaming services do this peekaboo thing? Sometimes I feel like I could waste the rest of my life running down Criterion Channel “Leaving Soon” titles and still would never catch up. Attempting to make lemonade, I decided to spend my month of Disney looking at Pixar pictures I still hadn’t seen. The first and main thing about Monsters, Inc., not surprisingly, is the excellence of the animation, which is stylish and always fun. Then I noticed for once I could recognize the voices of the main characters without having to look them up. John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Billy Crystal—well, Crystal was merely vexingly familiar, and I did have to look that one up. The Monsters, Inc. premise is all pro forma but reasonably clever. There’s a place where monsters live, called Monstropolis, and the energy there is powered by children’s screams. A whole factory system has been worked up for monsters to get jobs going into children’s bedrooms at night by way of their closets, do scary things, and collect the screams. It turns out the monsters are as afraid of children as children are of them. Ultimately one little girl makes it into Monstropolis and various hijinks ensue. Among other things our main monster, Sullivan (Goodman), finds that she is too adorable to destroy (admittedly, she is quite adorable) and he works to protect her. Sullivan is a pretty good character overall, furry and blue with purple highlights, but I have to say he reminded me of Shrek from another animated movie that also came out in 2001—both the kindly affection and the ogre-like oversized body. I know animated pictures have long lead times, so I doubt anyone was copping anything off anybody else. Monsters, Inc. is the better picture if the IMDb Top 250 Movies list is anything to go by—it’s on it whereas Shrek is not, at least when I looked just now (in October). Monsters, Inc. reminded me again how starved we were for sophisticated animated pictures like this in the ‘70s, where the hardest-core among us lived off the old Disney features and Fleischer cartoons in revival houses with folding chairs. Those old Disneys are masterfully done, I can admit now, but I had a beef with Disney back then that lingers on. I prefer what came in the wake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, with the animation fully funded (unlike, say, Hanna-Barbera’s Scooby Doo, Where Are You! TV series, which is charming and everything, maybe even culturally revolutionary, but cheap). I also like scripts that are full of sly jokes for the grownups. But that is something someone who loves Daffy Duck and Bullwinkle would think. Monsters, Inc.? Yes, absolutely, if you like a cartoon show don’t miss it if you can.

Pulse (2001)

Clues on the internet suggest the original Japanese Pulse (released in Japan as Kairo) is not particularly high on the list of so-called J-Horror, where Ringu, Ju-on, and Dark Water are more the first titles to be discussed. This is despite the fact that director and writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation) made one of the earliest with 1989’s Sweet Home. Like many J-Horror pictures from the 1990s and 2000s, Pulse got a US remake a few years on, and like many it had mixed results. I’m one who will stump for the US version of The Ring over Ringu, but otherwise the Japanese originals I’ve seen tend to be noticeably better. Certainly that’s the case with Pulse, although I should probably mention my viewing of the remake was on a somewhat sketchy free youtube version with a problem print or transfer. So I was a little hesitant to pull the trigger at all on the original but then I noticed it was available on a channel I’d already signed up for. Scour those catalogs—they’re often skimpy when you look into it—and cancel subscriptions quickly is turning into a way of life. Getting to the point, the Japanese Pulse is quite good. In many ways J-Horror is all slow burn—we learn the premises through the actions and reactions of the characters and the pacing is slow, like playing a 45 at 33. But the sense of dread is somehow thick and the images are carefully conceived and rendered to support specific moods. We are given ample time for the details to sink in like dense pellets of terror and anxiety paste. Things like black stains on walls, or red tape, or the words “The Forbidden Room” on a piece of paper coming from a printer become quite unnerving. More than you might think, or maybe you have to be in the mood and I was. Times being what they were in 2001, the sounds of modem tones connecting are heard often, and in ways they are not meant to be heard. The internet is unnaturally reaching out to connect with our characters. The premise is vague, leaving us to fill in the gaps: ghosts live on the internet like people in the Superman comics live in the Phantom Zone. Do they like it there? It’s hard to say, but they seem to want the living to join them, which the living find depressing if not terrifying. Pulse is one of those movies whose first half is better than the second, which is exacerbated by a longish running time of two full hours. But in that first half it accomplishes for me everything the much more widely celebrated Ju-on couldn’t—that atmosphere of overwhelming numbing terror, like panic-bad dreams, accomplished all with ideas and imagery and not once ever with cheap jump-scare cuts or gore. Worth a look, and maybe I’m ready for another try at Ju-on.

"Got to Kill Them All" (2001)

I was impressed with this Dennis Etchison story, which I found on the Trigger Warning website. It might be my favorite by Etchison yet, though he remains something of a puzzle for me. So far, I only know Dark Country by him, a collection of stories from the '70s and early '80s, which is where we're generally told to start. His stuff is cryptic and yet evocatively over-the-top, elusive but packing a punch. Literal monsters stalk Los Angeles, killer robots, strange beasts. They show up in places like freeway rest stops and 24-hour laundromats. This much later story has a lot of his usual stuff—the closely observed worlds of Los Angeles, notably after hours—but somehow revs up an extra notch. He is always playing with fractured perception, but here it feels more psychotic and scarier than usual. The disassociations are visceral. Reality phase-shifts on us. This is also typical of Etchison, who generally manages to hang on to a narrative arc. Our first-person narrator here is a game-show host. The themes of the show rattle in his head, multiple-choice questions in which contestants must pick the wrong answer. His punctuation and syntax slip and become sloppy, a sign of his internal stress. He is mad at his wife and has thoughts of killing her—more than thoughts. He has bought the materials to knock her out, tie her up, and burn the house down. That's the plan. This comes to us in pieces as he picks up a guy wandering the streets who recognizes him. It's a random Los Angeles street encounter but he lets the guy in his car. The guy has been having his own fights with his girlfriend. "They're all the same," our narrator says. "Think about it." They both have bad attitudes, and encourage each other, but the new guy seems to be thinking of how he can make amends. They stop at a quicky mart and he buys cleaning products. He's going to clean as a peace offering when he gets home, hoping she will take him back. But the narrator still has poisonous thoughts. What's only clear about him is that he's not thinking clearly, and this passenger becomes a wild-card element in the seesawing misogyny and noirish Los Angeles tension. Etchison keeps us at a distance but drawn continually back into it too, fighting to close these gaps of reality and hallucination, delivered in cool evocative banalities. In this one everything explodes at the end. Spoiler alert.

Read story online.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

USA, 110 minutes

Director: Wes Anderson

Writers: Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson

Photography: Robert D. Yeoman

Music: Mark Mothersbaugh, Wes Anderson K-tel Collection

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, Owen Wilson, Danny Glover, Bill Murray, Seymour Cassel, Kumar Pallana, Alec Baldwin

I knew the earlier films Bottle Rocket and Rushmore by director and cowriter Wes Anderson when I first saw The Royal Tenenbaums. I liked Bottle Rocket more than Rushmore but I knew people who were nutty for Rushmore and the soundtrack was notably good so I had nothing in particular against Anderson. But I had a bad reaction on this one—The Royal Tenenbaums hit me as precious and ironic to a fault, with a pointlessly colorful palette and other empty ornate flourishes, way too many trendy stars in the cast, and a ludicrous story about selfishness and redemption in a dysfunctional family I just couldn't buy—any of it. It has since colored my whole attitude toward Anderson pictures. Basically I like only his animated stuff (Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs) although under peer pressure I've ended up checking in with most of the rest.

Seeing The Royal Tenenbaums again finally for a second time and braced for the worst, I thought it was more deftly entertaining than I recalled. I wouldn't say it's motivating me to go back and revisit the catalog, but I am a little more willing to consider it. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) is a New Yorker, a terrible father, and not much of a businessman either—your basic rat. Now he seems to want to make amends with his unusually brilliant family of prodigies: ex-wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston), sons Chas (Ben Stiller) and Richie (Luke Wilson), adopted daughter Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), and all their various friends and hangers-on (Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, Danny Glover, etc.). It's not an ensemble piece so much as everybody, in their colorful outfits, gets a turn being the main also-ran of passing interest.

A Complete Lowlife (2001)

Writer and illustrator Ed Brubaker has gone on to bigger things with DC Comics and Marvel since this interesting little indie project. Full disclosure, I don't know any of that but I picked up on this back then as a partisan of Harvey Pekar, R. Crumb, Joe Matt, and all their comics-as-autobiography followers. So this "complete" Lowlife amounts to a handful of stories that appeared across a series of five comic books with two publishers. They are plainly in the vein of Pekar—Brubaker acknowledges him in an introduction—telling true stories of youth, petty crime, boredom, drug use, and immature relationships. My poor old tired eyes had some problems with some of the tiny hand printing, but most of these stories were entertaining and full of pathos. The characters are the usual motley assortment of obsessive fan types, celebrating cool but kind of nerdy. There's a great anecdote in one story about a job he takes at a collectors' bookstore, where he learns about the trade, sees others ripping the owner off, and starts ripping him off too. He feels shame about it but is defensive too, and then his feelings are hurt when he learns the owner knew about it all the time and now scorns him. At one time I might have liked the girlfriend stories best but now they just make me sad. Brubaker's stories might suffer a little because he is withholding detail, but there's a pretty fine balance when it comes to lacerating self-confession. Brubaker has some reasonably ugly stories to tell about himself, but even across the space of this series, which started and ended in the '90s, he seems to have turned out all right. One thing you can't miss is that eventually he abandoned the memoir mode and went more or less directly to superheroes. He's won a lot of awards too so he must be pretty good. He's a writer now almost exclusively and his interests are in the noir style and hard-boiled detective fiction. Just in 2019 he won an Eisner Award for "Best Graphic Album – New" for a project called My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, which is apparently a rehab story. It's not that hard to see how he got there from here. But my heart is closer to here—closer to these obsessive semi-narcissistic nerds working out their personal problems as they grow up, more often than not ineptly. I think Brubaker is also a pretty good illustrator, though on the simple and primitive side. I can see why he chose to work with others later but I like the unadorned style of this whole project.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Reading Chekhov (2001)

I actually forgot this book existed when I started on a project of reading stories by Anton Chekhov recently. I wish I would have remembered sooner because Janet Malcolm discusses another dozen or two stories beyond the ones I cherry-picked from internet recommendations. I know I have to get to his plays as well. Malcolm's slim book is based on travels as well as reading. She visits Russia and Ukraine to see the places Chekhov lived and knew. I don't do much of that sort of traveling myself—or any—but it does provide some interesting side details. As with much of the best of Malcolm, she excels at deep dives reaching for connections with an almost clinical precision. The story she returns to repeatedly is "The Lady With the Dog," but she ranges widely across Chekhov's work and brings an assortment of interesting insights to stories that might not have done much for me at first, such as the long "Ward No. 6" and "Peasants." She talks about Chekhov's literary relationship with Dostoevsky, for whom Chekhov claimed not to care much, and traces out points where Dostoevsky's influence is apparent. I still take much of the similarities I've noticed between them—largely, the blunt voice—as artifact of Constance Garnett, the prolific translator who worked extensively on material by both. I can feel the connection with Dostoevsky most in some of Chekhov's stories I don't like as much. I prefer the ones, like "The Lady With the Dog," that are almost pedestrian, yet elliptical and strangely moving, achieving their effects in ways that send me back with the idea of picking them apart to see how they work. That, in many ways, is Malcolm's project here, and she lingers over and returns frequently to a specific handful, including some of the plays. She loves Chekhov profoundly but resents the way he has become a kind of sentimental icon, a reflexive genius attended by platitudes. She focuses a lot on Chekhov's use of suggestive compressions, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) arguing it as his greatest strength. I think I agree—there's something deceptively casual about his best work, almost anecdotal, yet so many of these things stick with you for a long while. With his focus on the short story Chekhov can verge on the poetical. But he's also a consummate social realist, and the melancholy of his short life can subtly or not so subtly suffuse the work. Like Thoreau, like Kafka, like H.P. Lovecraft, like Elvis Presley, Chekhov died in his 40s. I'm happy for the beefed-up list.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things" (2001)

Story by JT LeRoy not available online.

JT LeRoy, as we understood him at the time of the publication of this story, was a 20-year-old street hustler, drug addict, and vagrant. Later he turned out to be a 35-year-old woman named Laura Albert, who claimed the LeRoy persona enabled her to write things she couldn't have otherwise. This title story of the cycle of stories published under JT LeRoy's name in 2001 may not even fairly represent her, as the book is considered by some to be a novel (see also William Burroughs's Exterminator! or Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son). Actually, knowing what I know now, this story seems weak to me—mostly intended to shock and not very convincing. The violence feels exaggerated, for one thing, more like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie, arch and ironic and heavy-handed with the gore. I was hoping for more. It's possible I just can't get out of the way of the real-life context. Before the LeRoy persona was exposed, Albert had an enviable amount of support from figures such as Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, and Courtney Love, who are often markers of taste whatever you think of their own work. As literary hoaxes go, the LeRoy episode may be one of the best, that story itself possibly the best we ever get from Albert, who abandoned the LeRoy persona after she was exposed. Similar to the famous Stanley Milgrom experiment in terms of ethical behavior and results, it offered up profoundly interesting and uncomfortable insights. I can sit here and say I'm not much impressed with the story, which strains in obvious ways for grotesque effect. But how would I have felt if I'd been caught up in the hoopla before Albert was exposed? For what it's worth, I read the Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology she edited in 2005 as LeRoy shortly before the exposure and I thought and still think it's one of the best in the series, along with Gaitskill's the following year. So I'm sorry to say I suspect I might have liked this story more, or said I did, much as I'm inclined now to say I don't. Social pressures are clearly affecting judgment here, which remains the most interesting aspect of this story for me for now. Laura Albert fooled people by appealing directly to their own marginal interests in violence, drugs, and alternative sexuality. That makes it embarrassing more than anything for those fooled. Yet anyone, played correctly, is likely to be a victim. But again, what's most interesting to me for my purposes here are the judgments we make of the story. It's easy to be repulsed by it now, and find it shallow, but where is the line that separates it from the work of some of her victims? That's not an easy question.

The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things by JT LeRoy

Money, Money, Money (2001)

With this late entry in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals, Ed McBain was just about out of ideas and starting to run out of luck. There's little sense he's having much fun writing this. He doesn't even seem to like Steve Carella or care about any of the others. Carella's personal thread is something about his sister and mother both remarrying. He has issues. The story is a godawful mess involving counterfeit money, vicious Mexican drug lords, and terrorism. Here's where he's running out of luck. With Money, Money, Money, written between the November 2000 Cole bombing and 9/11 in 2001, McBain is caught looking like he can't imagine very big. In fact, the terrorists here verge on clownish stereotypes. Forty years earlier, in the first appearance of the Deaf Man (The Heckler), McBain imagined something more on the scale of 9/11. Money, Money, Money was written in the tail end of that historical period when radical Islamic terrorists were underestimated, shortly before we entered the period of overestimating them. Fat Ollie Weeks has another big role here. McBain obviously enjoyed working with him, but to me he's more often a bigot not redeemed by being smart. His eating is overstated and his pathetic pursuit of a creative hobby—piano playing, novel writing—is not that funny, sympathetic, or even believable. In general, Fat Ollie is not the comic relief McBain seems to think he is. McBain had lots of irons in the fire at the time, as Evan Hunter and otherwise, so I'll give him a break on a book I read so you don't have to. The cheapest available version now is the hardcover, and I was surprised to see how much "money, money, money" went into it on the original publication. The cover is green, like money, and the interior design riffs on a marking that's used to detect counterfeit $100 bills. So it appears McBain still had a respectable audience at the time. But it had to be faithful to the series by loyalty or habit.

In case it's not at the library.

No More Shall We Part (2001)

Nick Cave's wedding album almost certainly has more to do with recovery from heroin addiction and alcoholism than with marriage, but that's OK. It works either way. "The contracts are drawn up, / The ring is locked upon the finger": whether he's talking about marital bliss, or a lifetime of sobriety charms, or both, it has the mournful yet profoundly gratifying sound of accepting responsibility. Its many layers are self-contradictory. Every time he uses a term like "no more shall we part," for example, all I hear is longing, sorrow, and absence. Maturity is a terrible price to pay for growing up, they like to crack at places where a guy like Nick Cave finds help (or maybe not: "goose-stepping twelve-stepping tee-totalitarianists," he erupts in an out-of-context pique at one point). You feel the rue in every song here. The sense of regretful wisdom hangs over it like swamp gas. But it's not all sorrow, or even mostly sorrow. It's tempered by real joy, compressed into the labors of simply producing it. The band is in an undeniable state of grace. The faith glows in the commitment to doing it. In practical terms, it's heard in the careful way the parts of the songs are worked out, and the way they're played. They're tentative, feeling their way through the moods of the lyrics, landing on riffs and hooks and good sounds that resonate. The McGarrigle singers, Kate and Anna, appear in the role of chick singers, and they are a heavenly presence. In one song a single note is struck on the piano repeatedly, finally rousing the band to the point, like a wire walker hundreds of feet in the air and no net, taking one step at a time. The singer here, the married man, would not have it any other way, I suspect—marriage is a type of high wire act—and I also suspect he's a bit like the songwriter, Nick Cave. With "the Lord" addressed so frequently, there's an ancient feeling about all this (or at least medieval) that tempts characterizations such as "Calvinist." You feel the tortured faith in it, or at least in the performance of it, the near-nihilism of a belief in predestination and its result in craven empty yearning for grace. "God is in the house," he sings in another song. "No cause for worry now." There he goes again. It sounds like worry is all he has.

Empire Falls (2001)

Richard Russo's big fat Pulitzer winner has any number of things going for it. It is utterly engaging, it is often very funny, and the last image is crystalline, if slightly overwrought, a perfect note of olde New England gothic. It is contemporary, but grounded. And it builds to an insane momentum that kept me anyway up way past my bedtime one night in a fever to finish it. I liked his earlier Straight Man nearly as much, maybe more, and recommend them both with little hesitation. The hesitation is a matter of something not so easily identified. I shouldn't be complaining when a novelist does his job so well, but for all its complexity it all resolves rather neatly. Not every last thread here is tied up, but those that aren't (e.g., whither Miles?) feel calculatedly ambiguous, tidy setups for reading groups (and/or American lit courses if things go well). The artfulness sometimes feel too artful, the angst almost pro forma, and the bonhomie forced. But now I'm churlish, complaining because it's too good. It's true that there are perhaps overly generous portions of feel-good moments. But the countervailing forces are often so strong that I was relieved to be able to remind myself that Russo is a writer of comedies of manners. If some things are going to sting, nothing's going to be traumatic. It's almost perfect on the slow dissolution of the mid-20th-century American postwar economy, the way all those small towns collapsed under the weight of their own naïve optimism (as we often view it now), as captains of industry pulled the rug out from under them by degrees. That is clearly the novel's great strength, and accounts for much of how it came to win all its various prizes. (That and the fact that it's olde New England, which is a topic for another time.) The characters are richly imagined and the complexities of the plot unfold with barely a misstep. Virtually every new chapter grabs hold hard and propels the momentum further, which is exactly how you go about keeping somebody up overnight. If it seems vaguely overwrought in its totality, as with that final image, it's still hard to complain that it doesn't get just about everything just right.

In case it's not at the library.

Shrek (2001)

USA, 90 minutes
Directors: Andrew Adamson, Vicky Jenson
Writers: William Steig, Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Joe Stillman, Roger S.H. Schulman, Cody Cameron, Chris Miller, Conrad Vernon
Production design: James Hegedus
Art direction: Guillaume Aretos, Douglas Rogers
Music: Harry Gregson-Williams, John Powell
Editor: Sim Evan-Jones
Cast/voices of: Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow, Vincent Cassel

What surprised me most about a revisit to Shrek is how dated it has become. (Full disclosure: though I saw Shrek when it was new, I have not since taken advantage of any of the offerings of the subsequent franchise, which include three sequels, five video games, various TV spinoffs, a comic book, and a Broadway musical.) I say this also acknowledging that many of its strengths are still there: taking a page out of The Princess Bride, it's as smart and knowing as ever about its sources, operates at both adult and kid levels, and tells its story with clarity, uncluttered by distraction. It's just complex enough to be interesting, it never cheats, and it is witty more often than gross (and even when it is gross, it is tame by today's standards).

One of the most obvious ways Shrek shows its age is also the one to be expected, which is the state of the art of the animation. I recall that the CGI here was considered one of its strong points on release, but now it just looks 12 years old—12 years that encompass a whole lot of innovation and development in the industry. Though it was conceived at one point in 3D, Shrek now seems to present-day animation somewhat as Hanna-Barbera of '70s TV was to it. But I don't make the finest distinctions among animation. The dated qualities of the Shrek CGI were enough for me to notice, but not enough to annoy. I would call Jay Ward one of my favorite animators and he's nothing if not primitive, so partly that's a matter of my own aesthetic. But another quality that dates Shrek is a bit more of an obstacle for me.

Mulholland Dr. (2001)

#6: Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

I saw Mulholland Dr. when it was new, as it happens with a couple of virulent naysayers, who walked out of the theater with me infuriated, sputtering, and ranting—this was it, they declared, they were through with David Lynch, who they believed meant no good whatever, who in fact they had come to believe was actually laughing at them, sounding a theme by Lynch debunkers heard now for decades. I mumbled something to the effect that maybe I had liked it a little more than they did, but the last 30 minutes were indeed so confounding and seemingly such a capricious slap in the face of anyone invested in the story that I was simply in no position to start trying to marshal my thoughts on it. The air was too thick with imprecations.

I'm not immune to such experiences myself—that could as well have been me walking out of Natural Born Killers or The Color Purple or The Usual Suspects, movies I disliked intensely for their various violations of good faith and intelligence and above all for their pandering, pretentious low-mindedness. I'm not even willing to take another look at them. But when the best-of lists for the decade started rolling out with Mulholland Dr. so frequently in such high position I knew it was time to take a look at that one again.