It’s a Wonderful Life (2006)

The 2006 version of Chris Stamey’s first solo album is what’s on offer on the internet today and that seems to be fine with Stamey, who remixed a couple of the songs from his curious 1982 release (the cover image above is from the ’82 LP), included three of the four songs from his 1984 Instant Excitement EP (minus the John Lennon cover, maybe a licensing issue), and for good measure added two alternate mixes of Wonderful Life songs and another from his 1991 LP Fireworks, “Something Came Over Me.” I was infatuated with the first version of It’s a Wonderful Life in the early ‘80s. Later my LP went missing and I never turned it up again. Thus, from memory, I must note that the remix of “Never Enters My Mind” seems inferior to the original, at least on first listens. I have no problem with the other remix from the original, “Face of the Crowd,” and, indeed, I’m already getting used to the new “Never Enters My Mind.” This 2006 release, which I somehow missed, is a reasonable approximation of a most peculiar solo album with a bunch of extra stuff. Stamey had gone from a sideman with Alex Chilton in the late ‘70s to playing in the band Sneakers with Mitch Easter to a principal with Peter Holsapple in the dBs, co-author of that band’s great first two albums. Stamey seemed to be working—and generally has all along—in a certain indie alternative pop mode where melody and the three-minute song are prized with smidges of feedback and noise (and sometimes smidges of sentiment, as on his Christmas albums). It’s a Wonderful Life—I think it’s just him overdubbing himself—suggests Stamey may have been more the force for racket in the dBs. It clunks and sprawls at slow pace like a New Orleans parade going down the line, with Stamey’s variously agonized vocals declaiming over it. The drumkit squats over it all, thundering. The album was early efforts by Stamey at production (the album is credited as “directed” by Stamey and recorded by Mitch Easter), so perhaps there’s some beginner’s luck at making all this work in almost a hypnotic way. You listen to it a few times and it gets to you. Stamey’s gift for melody does not fail him, as “Never Enters My Mind” (new and old), “Depth of Field,” and the title song are absolutely top of the line. I want to complain about “Get a Job,” which is not the Silhouettes 1957 sha-na-na hit but instead a cover of “Tobacco Road.” I’m still too scarred by too recently hearing the “Tobacco Road” cover by War with Eric Burdon. Points for prescience of a kind on “Brushfire in Hoboken,” where immigrants are blamed for a fire. The extra extras in the 2006 release are nice to have, notably the “Violin Version” of the title song with sawing and extra-added robot rhythms that somehow remind me of Harry Smith songs. I think it’s the shades of inexpertness. It’s a Wonderful Life—extremely odd, perhaps for fans only, but I found it worth the reunion revisit.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

Sang sattawat, Thailand / France / Austria, 105 minutes

Director/writer: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Photography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Music: Kantee Anantagant

Editor: Lee Chatametikool

Cast: Nantarat Sawaddikul, Jaruchai Iamaram, Arkanae Cherkam, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jenjira Pongpas, Nu Nimsomboon, Sin Kaewpakpin

As a class, film critics seem inclined to line up and laud the movies of Thai director and writer Apichatpong Weerasethakul—this is the fourth of his pictures I’ve had occasion to write about by way of surveying the critical roundups at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? (TSPDT). Weerasethakul is a little bit Lynchy and a whole bunch Kubricky and don’t forget Antonioni. He likes to look at things. He’s Western in many ways and Asian in many others—practical, humorous, spiritual, inscrutable. Mostly his movies are quite beautiful—credit to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Weerasethakul’s long-time collaborator—mostly they are slow, and mostly they are baffling. Syndromes and a Century, for example, appears to crack in half at the midpoint and go some other direction from the first half.

But it’s not really exactly so. Reading a synopsis helped me clarify that it’s more like a restart at the halfway point and pursuing other directions. It’s more a kind of memoir piece for Weerasethakul, presenting fragments of the lives of his parents, who were both doctors, amid sensory memories of his childhood. This simple explanation more or less put everything in order for me and, where I had been dreading looking at it again (I couldn’t make much of it the first time several years ago), I found it much more palatable and enjoyable this time. (Later I found that I might be entirely mistaken about what I saw.) Weerasethakul’s approach to narrative remains eccentric and opaque but that is offset somewhat by his pervasive, gentle humor. The result was one of my best times with his stuff.

Modern Times (2006)

All songs on this long, thoughtful, and satisfying Bob Dylan album are credited as written by Bob Dylan even though the titles include “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” which, you know—they’ve been done. But in some alchemical process I see starting with his early-‘90s cover albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, continuing (and peaking) with “Love and Theft”, and arguably finishing up here (or maybe Together Through Life, Tempest, or Rough and Rowdy Ways, none of which I know as well because they haven’t impressed me enough to go beyond a few casual listens), it feels less like some kind of plagiarism and much more like an artist who has entirely absorbed his sources and is capable of spitting them back out in new forms—these songs feel old and new all at once. Wikipedia scholars have been hard at work identifying those sources and pulling them out of the wonderful stew of Modern Times. Muddy Waters of course for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Bing Crosby for “When the Deal Goes Down,” Sleepy John Estes, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters again for “Someday Baby” (not to mention his own “Maggie’s Farm”), and ... Ovid?! ... for specific lines of the lyrics. I wanted to say Dylan wrote his own words for the various blues / country standards, which justifies his authorship, but with Ovid now in the picture all bets are off, public domain or no. Amazingly, none of this gets in the way in terms of the pleasures of these 10 long songs. I’m not exactly sure how Dylan gets away with his thievery but he does and that’s a fact. Indeed, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” are high points of a very good set. Much is result of a band nearly as well-versed in the standards and with whom he had been playing on tour for the year previous. A lot of what’s great here is this sympathetic, well-rehearsed band that is so clearly in synch with him. But Dylan remains the sun around which these planets whirl. Rock critic dean Robert Christgau gave the album a rare A+, which he also applied to “Love and Theft”. I’m still more a partisan for that one, along with Time Out of Mind, operating in another sphere entirely. But Modern Times is like your favorite easy chair. You can sit in its lap every day, often hearing new things and, even when you don’t, it’s practically pure comfort. Put it on and pull up a seat.

Living With War (2006)

I think it’s arguable that Living With War is the best album by Neil Young in the decade of the 2000s but note also it’s his 27th album and fifth decade of making albums, introducing an element of faint praise to this assessment. Not surprisingly, there is a certain level of sameness and familiarity to the tunes in this set, all written by Young except the closing chestnut, “America the Beautiful.” The latter is there partly as the US center-left forces with which Young has always more or less been aligned attempted (vainly, I’m sorry to say) to reclaim ideas like patriotism, self-sacrifice, and love of country from belligerent rightwing forces, even as the folly of the second Iraq war was setting in as conventional wisdom. The other reason the patriotic hymn is there is because the 100-voice choir brought in for this album just sounds so damn good. Young looked to the rush job of “Ohio” in 1970 for inspiration, writing and recording Living With War in nine days. Does it work? Well, they are Neil Young songs, marked by his usual points of melody and charging power. You might not think so scanning the track list, but it’s perfectly possible (and recommended!) to sing along with or at least head-bob to songs like “Living With War,” “Shock and Awe,” and “Let’s Impeach the President” (for lying). Listen to the album a few times and you may likely find yourself singing along against your will. Another point that sets this album apart is the 100-voice choir. Album-closer “America the Beautiful” is where it chiefly gets the spotlight, but it appears on most of these tracks, lending the material a wonderful luster and certain level of celestial awe (no shock). Countering this display of beauty—already countered to some degree by the angry political themes—is an occasional trumpet (played by Tommy Bray), which sounds homely and barely competent yet fits the mood perfectly, playing like a soldier in bandages. It is surprising and apt and satisfying the way Neutral Milk Hotel’s cornet can be. Earlier in the decade, I worried that Young’s tribute to the heroic passengers of flight United 93 on 9/11, “Let’s Roll,” veered dangerously close to a lot of the volcanic jingoism that proceeded out of that day until 2006 and well beyond. But Living With War clarifies any ambiguities of Young with regard to the militarism that followed 9/11. In the era of Donald Trump Living With War already sounds depressingly quaint. But it’s still a pretty good Neil Young album.

My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (2006)

In many ways Mike McGonigal’s entry in the 33-1/3 series feels like a template for how to do it, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on why exactly. For one thing Loveless is not so obviously a classic album, at least within the boomer frame that is inevitably a big part of this series and my own perceptions (by default if nothing else—boomer albums have just had more time to grow classic). McGonigal mixes up the structure so many of these authors take: 1) a history of the artist, and 2) the album track by track. His rundown of the songs is fast and high-level, for example, showing up in the second chapter of 17. The rest of the book does involve a history, specifically of how the album was recorded, why it took so long, and why nothing else (at the time the book was published in 2006), or very little, had been recorded and released by My Bloody Valentine since. I never saw MBV but I owned Loveless in the early ‘90s, which struck me itself as a certain template for shoegaze and maybe some aspects of grunge: a thundering bottom, on top of which floated lovely melody in the high register, ghostly, ethereal, and often quite striking, heard through cacophonies of distortion. I played it a lot. Listening again with more perspective, it’s apparent MBV was something unusual and special. It was as if they took the dynamics formulas and smeared them sideways slightly, like fingerpainting. McGonigal gets into MBV principal Kevin Shields’s use of the guitar tremolo bar, an auditory concept Shields applied to every part of the project. The lyrics are swallowed up and work more like rorschach if you’re inclined to pay attention to lyrics. The band was legendary for deafeningly loud concerts. Some of the effects McGonigal and others have described veer alarmingly close to physical damage. It often sounds like evidence of tinnitus but at the same time with spiritual overtones. I especially like the way McGonigal deals with this aspect of the album and band. He’s not overtly claiming spiritual experiences but read between the lines. He circles the album and its impact, somehow managing to keep it all straightforward, lucid, and compelling. I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, but there’s little question now of the status of Loveless as classic. McGonigal was among the many faithful. He almost casually, deceptively makes the case for how the album works, which is remarkable given that most words simply fall short in this kind of heady realm. This book is not necessarily as classic as the album, but it comes closer than you might think it could.

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

Colossal Youth (2006)

Juventude em Marcha, Portugal / France / Switzerland, 156 minutes

Director/writer: Pedro Costa

Photography: Pedro Costa, Leonardo Simoes

Music: Nuno Carvalho, Os Tubaroes

Editor: Pedro Filipe Marques

Cast: Ventura, Vanda Duarte, Beatriz Duarte, Cila Cardoso, Alberto “Lento” Barros

When it came time to look again at Colossal Youth, which I saw first maybe 10 years ago, I found I had virtually no memory of it. Alas this is not unusual. For a long time I had good habits of looking at movies most days—at least six days a week, and some of those occasions were double or even triple features. At some point, however, I realized I was not always retaining that much of them. But I kept blazing through anyway—second impressions often remain clarifying. So it was not entirely surprising not to have even a vague impression of Colossal Youth. But as soon as I put it on I saw the problem right away. There are very few helpful handholds in this long and very slow picture.

In fact, I’m not even sure now exactly what it’s about. Or maybe I should say, my main sense of what it’s about comes not from watching it (twice now at last count) but from reading about it on the internet. There you find it likened to documentary, chiefly I guess because most of the players are amateurs possibly playing themselves and the picture is focused on the fallout of a Portuguese coup in the ‘70s. It appears to be scripted rather than improvised. The best evidence may be that director Pedro Costa also takes a writing credit, but the action mostly feels performed. The picture consists largely of long takes, often shot in long and with darkness or light poured over like spilled paint. The dialogue is unfocused, oblique, and repetitive, but the talk revolves around poverty, drug use, attempts to salvage ghetto housing projects gone to ruin. Colossal Youth is another one that premiered at Cannes and saw a lot of people walking out.

Children of Men (2006)

USA / UK / Japan, 109 minutes

Director: Alfonso Cuaron

Writers: Alfonso Cuaron, Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, P.D. James

Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki

Music: John Tavener

Editors: Alfonso Cuaron, Alex Rodriguez

Cast: Clive Owen, Clare-Hope Ashitey, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Peter Mullan, Pam Ferris, P.D. James

The most surprising thing for me about this movie is that P.D. James wrote the source novel, The Children of Men, published in 1992. I know James as more of a detective fiction writer on the cozy side of things, and this dystopian future nightmare is anything but cozy. It has a terrific premise—set in 2027, after a sudden and mysterious onset of human infertility has led to no live births in nearly 20 years. James and five screenplay writers, including director Alfonso Cuaron, imagine what the future would look like in the circumstances. Set in London and the UK, it’s a pretty grim scene—bombings, terrorism, random violence, a world tearing itself apart from the inside.

Actually, it doesn’t look that different from now, or even 2006 (think Baghdad and other Iraqi cities). The sad fact is that not much is really done with the premise specifically. The first time I saw this picture I was kind of meh about the whole thing, but more recently I realized it’s better to take what’s given at face value and enjoy it as a fast-paced, gritty thriller with some notably impressive set pieces. In general it is also bold and brave about killing off characters early if it is so inclined, including characters we like and admire. But the main thing is the pell-mell pace and the ordnance going off on the regular.

Still Life (2006)

San xia hao ren, China / Hong Kong, 108 minutes

Director: Zhang-ke Jia

Writers: Zhang-ke Jia, Na Guan, Jiamin Sun

Photography: Nelson Lik-wai Yu

Music: Giong Lim

Editor: Jinlei Kong

Cast: Sanming Han, Tao Zhao, Hongwei Wang

Like the Hole album Live Through This, the deceptively bland title of this movie is open to numerous interpretations—most obviously a type of painting or photography, a description of animals holding position, and a heartening observation of the will to live. In one way or another, all those aspects are represented in Still Life. I have seen it described as a movie in which nothing happens, so caveats, but I think really what is happening may be so monumental it’s almost bigger than perception. The broad setting is China’s Three Gorges Dam in the late stages of that massive, multi-decade project. The ancient town of Fengjie, established circa 300 BCE, is slowly evacuating, preparing to be flooded and submerged in coming weeks. Two characters wander into this chaos—Sanming (Sanming Han) and Shen Hong (Tao Zhao)—and both are looking for people long absent from their lives.

It’s fair to say very little happens in this movie, at least on the surface. The two characters don’t know each other and never cross paths, though they seem to have a random connection in at least one person. Sanming is searching for a daughter he has not seen in 16 years since she was an infant and Shen Hong is looking for a husband who has been away working for two years. She has an urgent message for him. Still Life is slow and a little cryptic, never helping us much with these two and what they are about. But the feelings they raise in their determined, patient searches, plus the scope of the dam project literally consuming the town of Fengjie and everything all around us, somehow make it wholly satisfying to follow, absorb, and gawk at.

Nirvana's In Utero (2006)

Gillian Gaar's contribution to the 33-1/3 shelf is a fast and fun read, one of the better I've seen of the more straightforward volumes in the series. This is because there are interesting sideline stories about this album and because Gaar has the skill to chase down the details and make it a good story altogether—which it should be, given that it's Kurt Cobain's last studio project. He gave us a great live set in the Unplugged show and that was it. Full disclosure: I know Gillian, and I can still be nostalgic for those days of 1993. One notorious storyline of In Utero was Steve Albini's participation as producer/engineer, which was a moiling cloud of media confusion at the time. Gaar spoke to Albini years later and his sober perspective is one of the best parts of this book. She spares us as much of the drama as she can regarding Courney Love, Frances Bean, Axl Rose, Cobain's fraught relations with reporters, etc., but inevitably some of that is here. We are also spared a good deal of Cobain's angst, but that is just as inevitably here too, including the stomachaches and plagues of insecurity. Mostly she shows us a group of professionals intent on getting things done. They largely produced about half of a great album, with some of his best songs alternating with noise squalls that somehow sound a lot better than I remembered. In the track-by-track rundown section (also inevitable in most of these books), Gaar does a good job of sorting out and analyzing these squalls and accords them the punk-rock respect Cobain sought in them. She never stack-ranks the Nirvana albums, but makes an interesting point that listening to Bleach, Nevermind, and In Utero together makes the development of the band clear. As always you have to wonder how far it might have gone. Dave Grohl has reinvented himself as a rock star as surely as New Order rose from the ashes of Joy Division. I will say I don't hate him the way some do. Gaar, writing in 2006, doesn't have much to say about Grohl or Krist Novoselic either, apart from their contributions to In Utero, which of course were significant.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Guns N' Roses' Use Your Illusion I and II (2006)

Eric Weisbard's turn at the 33-1/3 plate is often fun to read but a bit too rock critic insider even for me. This essay is personal, ambitious, and ambitiously personal. His professed obsession with the mammoth mediocre Guns N' Roses drop of 1991 is eccentric and nuanced, though it's questionable whether the band or album merits that. As Weisbard sets the table and describes himself bopping across the rock critic landscape of the 1990s and 2000s, it's apparent he has specific intentions with words like "pop," "punk," and "metal." Not surprisingly, perhaps, he tends to disdain metal as beneath him even as he rushes to embrace punk. What Weisbard seems to like about GN'R and specifically Axl Rose and his various incoherent dramas is something energizing that he calls punk. I think celebrity might be the better word. As a conceit, most of this short book is specifically written before Weisbard has listened to the album again for the first time in years (as opposed to my way, spending two months with it in my shuffle playlist, where oh my brothers and sisters, it chafes). The book closes out with brief track-by-track notes on the behemoth. It's a strange way to approach an album, but then a strange way to approach is one thing the 33-1/3 series specializes in. I bet this one sounded good in proposal, a kind of memory / perception exercise. Weisbard's relationship with both the band and the album(s) is complicated—by class, by education, by the uncertainties of taste. Inevitably this book is more about Weisbard than anything else. After that it is more about celebrity than anything else, as that was the predicate for the whole Use Your Illusion ad infinitum in the first place—practically the last GN'R album, as it turned out. Weisbard is informative talking about the blockbuster album model. He seems to put the origin at Thriller whereas I would say Rumours or Tapestry, but he discusses how these albums attack commercially with a cascading array of singles, one after the other, producing hit streams (this has metastasized ludicrously on today's Billboard charts, where a new Drake album, for example, automatically earns him 15 or so spots in the Hot 100 for a week or two). However, hit streams and a blockbuster album did not really happen here. "Don't Cry" made #10 in 1991 and "November Rain" #3 in 1992. "Live and Let Die" crawled up to #33. "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" did well around the world but not in the US. End of story, 30 tracks and three hours later. With the exception of the Dylan cover and maybe a few others (on all of which I am merely lukewarm) I don't care anything for this big bloated album. I admit I went to see the spectacle live in an arena in 1991—Axl got mad and ended the show early, so I got my GN'R money's worth at least. As for this 33-1/3 title I'm dutybound to say others in the series deserve to be read before it. It's working on 90% inspiration and you just can't win 'em all.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Real Punks Don't Wear Black (2006)

My favorite part of Frank Kogan's artfully constructed book (I'm still wondering how it comes so relatively late and remains his only one) was the second section, which is more in a memoir vein, and especially the chapter on junior high, which is the truest thing I've ever read—or truest to my own experience anyway—about the terrifying rite of suburban adolescent passage. He treats it by writing about fear. He's also really great on Bob Dylan, notably Dylan's imperial phase 1964-1966, working up a nice lather for example on the typical Dylan zen koan, from Highway 61 Revisited, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken." Kogan's treatment of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago is another high point of the book. I've always had an uneasy relationship with Kogan's writing and a little paradoxical. I have a high level of trust for his taste in music, but I often glaze over on his dives into the rabbit holes that preoccupy him, such as the meaning of "meaning." I like his social-mapping ideas and believe with him that social context is more involved in musical (and all) taste than most people give credit. But then, though he talks about social mapping, he doesn't seem to do much of it. At one point he lists out familiar and semi-familiar terms—jocks, socs, nerds, stoners, etc.—but assumes they're understood. I was stopped, reading this 2006 book about the early 1970s in 2019, by the term "greaser." I have some idea what it might mean, but it covers a wide range of possibilities, some of them overlapping and some exclusionary to others (Latinos? motorheads? Elvis clones?). Speaking of meaning, perhaps the most baffling, frustrating, and illuminating part of the book is his discussion of "Superwords," which Kogan says are words whose definitions people fight about in social terms, often categories of music, e.g., punk, hip-hop, rock 'n' roll, etc. Nearest and dearest to Kogan's evident heart he put in the title of the book, along with an example of the problem, i.e., "Real [Superword] means this / doesn't mean that." This is eminently worth looking at but it leads Kogan down a narrow hole when Wittgenstein rings the doorbell. It's good at suggesting the difficulty of the problem (the meaning of meaning, more or less) but it also reads a little like he's still annoyed with some college instructor who wrote something on one of his papers he didn't like. It's not the only reason his most obvious antecedent as a rock critic is Richard Meltzer.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Inland Empire (2006)

France / Poland / USA, 180 minutes
Director / writer / photography / editor: David Lynch
Music: David Lynch, Krzysztof Penderecki, Marek Zebrowski
Cast: Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Therous, Harry Dean Stanton, Karolina Gruszka, Peter J. Lucas, Krzysztof Majchrzak, Julia Ormond, Grace Zabriskie

The reluctant reviewer: I kept meaning to pick up a copy of this some years ago when I noticed the price drop below $10, but then I kept putting it off for the same reason I dreaded looking at it again recently. It wasn't much fun the first time. Now that it's out of print in DVD and inevitably commanding collector prices, it turned out to be Netflix DVD, of all places, that foiled my attempt to skip it—no waiting and the disc played fine. As projects by director David Lynch go (in this case, he's also the writer, cinematographer, and editor, plus provides music), it's an extreme example of the discontinuity inserted at the end of Mulholland Dr. and the middle of Lost Highway, with a tantalizing if hard to follow thriller giving way to a somewhat senseless explosion of semi-related images and scenes. Even dreams are more organized than Inland Empire. The part that almost makes sense is one hour. The rest is two hours.

My expectations were low so I ended up liking it more the second time and/or I had more patience for it. Lynch's films are always funny but I noticed and enjoyed it more this time. He's also expert at ratcheting tension out of very little. In the first 15 minutes there's an extremely worrisome conversation between Laura Dern and Grace Zabriskie. I forgo giving character names. Why even try? Dern is credited on IMDb as playing two characters but at least one of them is an actress playing other roles. In many ways Inland Empire defies time and gravity and exists as a map of Laura Dern's face. I found it useful, when my mind began to wander, to think of the picture as a kind of extended John Coltrane solo and Laura Dern as David Lynch's instrument.

Fundamental (2006)

Fundamental exists at a certain point for me of perfect indifference toward the Pet Shop Boys, a lost album between when I started seriously losing interest with Release and before my retrospective interest revived  in a second-chapter kind of way with Yes. I couldn't connect with the 2005 Battleship Potemkin project for a long time—I think now it's a worthy if somewhat anemic effort, anemic perhaps by design or necessity as a formal soundtrack—and then I had instinctive animus against the pointless, witless "Sodom and Gomorrah Show" and "I'm With Stupid," which seemed to me much worse than any of the others might have been good enough, making the album not even worth hearing (my problems with the skip button are an issue for another time). I haven't changed my position there much. Note to b-side naysayers: all of Alternative is better than either. They are real all-career lows, stupid songs that act as if we are as stupid as they are pretending to be, so to speak. The album opener, "Psychological," is pro forma. "I Made My Excuses and Left" is one of their typically great titles but the song is only overdone recycled effects. "Minimal" is a reasonable rouser, though it sags some. The Diane Warren song "Numb," big and purple as it is, may be the best song here. Indulging their penchant for theatrical drama (albeit growing alarmingly sentimental), with Neil Tennant in the spotlight putting it all out there (yet also keyword "numb"), it is easier to forgive given how affecting this song somehow is on its face. That means I just plain like it, though I may not understand why, as with the original "MacArthur Park"—something so ineffably sad about that cake. The shorty "God Willing" and "Luna Park," more of a two-part suite, follow in a similar vein with more certain syrupy attractions. "Casanova in Hell" is even more of same, in an acoustic vein, but now it's not working, "Twentieth Century" is back to more like it, with a groove, a hypnotic melody, and the sweet hope of love. "Sometimes the solution is worse than the problem" speaks to its big ambitious title as well as its intimate romantic comedy lyric. "Indefinite Leave to Remain" feels recycled but more or less lives up to the nice title—another torchy one for Tennant. And "Integral" finishes the way the album starts—pro forma. A perfectly professional product, delivered approximately on time. It's Fundamental.

What Is the What (2006)

I knew virtually nothing about the Lost Boys of Sudan when I started Dave Eggers's "novel," but after finishing it I not only have a better understanding of that chapter of history, but the details are also impossibly vivid. I use the term novel in scare quotes because that is the book's marketing label and the category in which it won awards and acclaim. What Is the What is closer in form to a memoir—closer even than to biography, because it tells the story of Valentine Achak Deng in the first person. Achak (as he is most often called here) lost his parents and siblings and was forced to flee his Sudanese village on foot after it was overrun by violence and destruction in the long Sudanese civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2005. He was not even 10. Joining with others, he walked nearly 2,000 miles to a refuge in Ethiopia, from which he was ejected by wartime circumstances and forced to make another long trek on foot to Kenya. Eventually, as an adult, he finds his way to the US as an immigrant. What Eggers has done with this story is nothing less than remarkable. It does work like a novel because in many ways it's structured like one—with a 24-hour frame story set in Atlanta, where Achak finally lands, that proceeds with unreeling memories of his life. It works like a memoir because Eggers so completely occupies the point of view of Achak. Eggers already showed his skill for memoir and lost boys in his own tale published six years earlier, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, his first book. It's interesting to see someone so immersed in memoir who also appears to be so egoless, at least in his writing. What Is the What (subtitled The Autobiography of Valentine Achak Deng) works so well because there is so little Eggers and so much Achak. But the telling here counts nearly as much as the tale. By making it a novel, taking the liberties of flashbacks, information artfully withheld, suspense, and other techniques of fiction, it bypasses dry historical accounts and is that much more effective. Once here, Achak has nearly as many problems in the US, and ultimately this story encompasses American experience as much as Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Kenyan. And if Eggers has the human spirit of Achak right, as he seems to, he's even more shrewd about getting out of the way of it. In spite of a life of unimaginable privations and hardships, Achak is a warm light burning bright. You can't help but love him, and this book is the most direct way into that for most of us. I'm really tempted to call it a masterpiece.

In case it's not at the library.

The Lives of Others (2006)

Das Leben der Anderen, Germany, 137 minutes
Director / writer: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Photography: Hagen Bogdanski
Music: Stephane Moucha, Gabriel Yared
Editor: Patricia Rommel
Cast: Ulrich Muhe, Martina Gedeck, Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Tukur, Thomas Thieme, Volkmar Kleinert, Hans-Uwe Bauer, Charly Hubner, Herbert Knaup

The Lives of Others is set in 1984, which is an interesting choice for a movie made in 2006. Because the picture resonates with the totalitarian surveillance-state themes of George Orwell's 1984 novel, it feels futuristic, technocratic, and dystopian. Yet because the events occur in East Germany, a country that no longer even exists, it reminds us 1984 is in the past, inevitably casting a kind of insinuating nostalgic mist over it, even in the TV style setups it often uses, moving like a quiet BBC miniseries with lots of interior scenes. The casual propaganda-tinged statements about what's good or not good for socialism feel quaint and naïve. Yet more than anything The Lives of Others exists in the here and now of its own time, in this case the late period of the Bush/Cheney administration and its extensive rollout of a surveillance state (under which we, meaning basically the whole world, still live), reminding us that events like these are neither future nor past but vividly pressing issues of the moment.

Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe) is a true believer and agent of Stasi, East Germany's intelligence and secret police, which the film notifies us early numbered some 100,000 direct employees and 200,000 paid informants. Its greatest preoccupation appears to be with people defecting to the West. Wiesler is so good at his work that he also teaches at university and the first thing we see is his classroom instruction on interrogation techniques, including long interviews, lie detection, sleep deprivation, deception and threats, etc. Like many in law enforcement roles, Wiesler has a mental frame that tends toward seeing criminals and criminal activity everywhere he looks. Just so, he's got a hunch that the celebrated East German writer Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is not the state-loving boy scout everyone thinks he is. If Wiesler can get something on him it will be good for Wiesler's boss, Oberstleutnant Anton Grubitz (Ulrich Tukur), so he's given the latitude to open a full investigation—and we get a good view of what a full investigation in East Germany looked like.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006)

El laberinto del fauno, Spain / Mexico / USA, 118 minutes
Director / writer: Guillermo del Toro
Photography: Guillermo Navarro
Music: Javier Navarrete
Editor: Bernat Vilaplana
Cast: Ivana Baquero, Maribel Verdu, Sergi Lopez, Alex Angulo, Ariadna Gil, Doug Jones

Pan's Labyrinth is a very different movie from The Spirit of the Beehive (which by coincidence I was writing about a few weeks ago) but the similarities are striking. Both focus on the perceptions and experience of a young girl, both involve fevered imagination states and possibly magic (or certainly "magic"), and both are set in Spain in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, isolated in remote regions but with World War II still raging beyond the horizons. It's even possible to say that Pan's Labyrinth is equally preoccupied with the same two questions that haunt Beehive: Why did the monster kill the girl? Why did the people kill the monster?

But where Beehive is quiet and locates its motivating conflicts at the margins, Pan's Labyrinth is pulpy and rich with glittering special effects and showy clashes. They are both fairy tales, after a fashion, with raw brutalities. Another picture Pan's Labyrinth bears comparison with is Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, also comfortable with magic and inhumanity. In terms of the way it looks, however, the special effects puts Pan's Labyrinth more in the company of movies like Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars 23, Harry Potter, able to soar on its visual conceits even if you are never fooled that what you are looking at is anything but movie special effects. For that reason, perhaps, I usually end up a little underwhelmed by Pan's Labyrinth. Instead of fairies and a magical faun I tend to see a really impressive movie budget. Pan's Labyrinth rings with the dulcet tones of allocated capital. Some spoilers.

King Dork (2006)

This came to me as a recommendation in YA lit, out of the context of some thoughts I had on the animated picture Spirited Away. Frank Portman—who as Dr. Frank is captain of Bay Area punk-rock band the Mr. T Experience—is one of those enviable writers who can make his prose sing. That's helpful when, among other things, you are gunning for J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. This novel is more than just that, however: "It's actually kind of a complicated story," writes the first-person narrator, Tom Henderson, "involving at least half a dozen mysteries, plus dead people, naked people, fake people, teen sex, weird sex, drugs, ESP, Satanism, books, blood, Bubblegum, guitars, monks, faith, love, witchcraft, the Bible, girls, a war, a secret code, a head injury, the Crusades, some crimes, misrepresentation of skills, a mystery woman, a devil-hand, a blow job, and rock and roll." Yet therein lies the rub, more or less. It reminded me a little of the TV show Lost. In the beginning it is bristling with exploding ideas, but in the end it is gyrating like mad to make the pieces fit. I got lost myself at some point in King Dork, but I have a hunch all the pieces do fit pretty well down at their details. It's more the big picture I was concerned with. Mistaken identity and/or not recognizing someone you already know (cf., Lois Lane and Clark Kent / Superman) makes one key plot point hard to believe. Tom's family story and his mother are murky but whatever the realities it sounds at least formative and traumatic, which is not represented very urgently here, or at all. Maybe that's beside the point. If your target demographic is the disaffected tween to teen boy, and you are thinking in those terms, then there may be no good reason to get touchy-feely and lose them. As a baby boomer, I was entertained to find myself on the wrong side of this novel's generation gap. Tom deplores us all as hypocritical blowhards who can't let go of Vietnam, civil rights, the Beatles, and especially The Catcher in the Rye, which he excoriates. It's not hard to recognize the caricature and its realities. As it happens, I reread the Salinger recently, experiencing again (not that I reread it that often) how dated it has come to feel with its prep schools and New York Upper East Side lifestyle. Portman's update on the state of the nerd circa the turn of the millennium is bracingly candid. Tom's friendship with his best friend Sam Hellerman is at once shallow and deep, tenuous and committed, as only the relationships forged at that time of life are. King Dork may cheat a little on the character development, but the surface presentation is often dazzling.

In case it's not at the library.

Babel (2006)

France / USA / Mexico, 143 minutes
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Writers: Guillermo Arriaga, Alejandro G. Iñárritu
Photography: Rodrigo Prieto
Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
Editors: Douglas Crise, Stephen Mirrione
Cast: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, Koji Yakusho, Adriana Barraza, Rinko Kikuchi, Elle Fanning

I'm never going to knock director and cowriter Alejandro González Iñárritu for ambition. He thinks big, he dreams big, and it's always about making the big overpowering cinematic gesture, impact, weaving narrative structures, kinetic visuals, and explosive action intuitively across complex stories. Babel, as usual, has a few storylines, and even a number of separate time streams. In the end it's mostly a familiar lament about the geography of our shrinking interconnected world, with more communication but less communicating (or vice versa, I'm sure). See also the Bible story that supplies the title. Well, that's Iñárritu for you. Babel takes the guise of the "for want of a nail" tale, otherwise known as the "butterfly effect" in chaos theory. One thing leads to another and if it weren't for that one thing there wouldn't be all these others.

I've straightened Babel all out for you and I'll give you the spine of it straight, and then we can get to the details, which is where this movie is most alive and worth seeing: A wealthy Japanese man, after a big-game hunting trip, gives his Moroccan guide a highly powerful and accurate rifle as a kind of tip. The guide sells the rifle to his neighbor who needs a way to get rid of the jackals that are preying on his goats. Of the neighbor's two sons, the youngest is a natural sharpshooter, but there is sibling rivalry between the two. Out hunting jackals one day the boys want to see how far the rifle can shoot—they have been told three kilometers. Sibling rivalry happens and the youngest boy shoots at a tour bus some good distance away from their mountain perch. As it happens he plugs Cate Blanchett as Susan Jones right in the neck. She's hate-traveling with Brad Pitt as her husband Richard, trying to patch up a faltering marriage. They have the glow of Americanness about them. The situation—immediately taken as terrorism, of course—also means, back in their San Diego home, that no one can be found to take care of their kids so that their long-time trusted housekeeper can attend her son's wedding in Mexico. So she decides to take the kids with her. Crossing into Mexico with those kids and her ne'er-do-well nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) is one of the best scenes in the movie. You somehow know nothing good is going to come of it. The foreboding is overwhelming.

Back to Black (2006)

I didn't much go for last year's documentary about Amy Winehouse, Amy, which I suppose I went to out of some sense of duty. The truth is I had always kind of avoided the topic—scoring a hit called "Rehab" and then dying at the age of 27 of problems related to substance abuse never struck me as a winning formula. Honestly, self-destruction, tragic death, and that kind of thing have had diminishing interest for me since approximately turning 40. But Winehouse obviously had a faithful following, and if the documentary may be altogether too thrilled with celebrity for my taste, it still offered a primer on her career and a basic insight that helped me turn a corner, certainly with the most famous of her two albums, which opens on her one and only hit. She says it herself in the documentary at one point, but it really took the visuals to drive it home for me: with this album, at least, she is drawing on sources from Brill Building New York in the early '60s, the era of girl groups and megalomaniacal producers—Phil Spector, Shadow Morton, the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las are all obvious starting points on some of the best songs here (and on "Rehab" too), with horn charts, backing singers, purring organ keyboards, clanking piano chords, and sultry grooves. There are real glories in the dense wallop of these tracks, and whether produced by Salaam Remi or Mark Ronson they are completely up to making a context for Winehouse's greatest weapon, her croaking, searching, warbling, and offhandedly powerful voice. She uses that to create a perfectly charming New Jersey persona here—"What kind of fuckery is this?" she demands as one song drops in. I don't know jazz singing, because I'm not that interested in it, but even I can pick out the chops she has. And I didn't need Tony Bennett to confirm it for me in the picture, but it was nice to see. The focus of her music often revolves around the imposing presence of her voice, but she is never a mere technician, often leaping into instinct, and she was also getting better at writing songs too (though unfortunately less so perhaps at actually applying herself to it, and yes, we all know why). So, right, this is a pretty great album, complete with its own style, mood, moxie, and impact, part beehive hairdo, part smoky nightclub, part grabby insistent hooks and rhythms, and all heart. A real beauty, for the ages.

The Shape of Things to Come (2006)

Somehow I drifted away from Greil Marcus after the 21st century started. As a friend says—the same friend who urged me to take a look at this—"Greil Marcus loves finding great importance in small things." I take that as a good thing and I'm glad I checked this out. Sub-billed as "Prophecy and the American Voice," it focuses on John Winthrop (English Puritan lawyer and cofounder of Massachusetts), Philip Roth (American Jewish novelist), David Lynch (Montana filmmaker), and David Thomas (Cleveland rock 'n' roller), along with the usual assorted sundry. I like Marcus's chosen lifestyle / profession of sitting in his room and thinking of ideas, making connections between the music and art and books he reads, looks at, and listens to. It often means many things are coming up at once and he can build charmingly intricate balancing acts talking about them all at once, seemingly unrelated but relentlessly connecting the dots—and really connecting them. I loved his deep dive on the Philip Roth novels American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, along with Roth's American dystopia, The Plot Against America. My view on Roth is slightly different, favoring Sabbath's Theater as his masterpiece, which Marcus does not mention. David Lynch gets perhaps the lion's share of attention in this collection, with two sections devoted to two of Lynch's most controversial movies, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway. Marcus does much to illuminate both of them, though unlike many I was already something of a long-time convert to the Twin Peaks movie, which I think sometimes could be Lynch's best. I'm curious but I'm not sure how this long piece on it is taken by the typical Lynchian, just as I'm not sure what a typical Lynchian even looks like. What I like best about Marcus are his deep preoccupations with the things of strange beauty. In some cases, as with the Sex Pistols and David Lynch, I arrived there my own way. In other cases, as with Elvis Presley, Marcus made me see things I never had before. The Shape of Things to Come was a little more like the first for me. I especially enjoyed seeing what he has to say about Roth and Lynch. For anyone who likes Marcus.

In case it's not at the library.