Paloma Faith, “Crybaby” (2017)

[listen up!]

Paloma Faith’s first single from her fourth album kept reminding me of “The Boy Is Mine” by Brandy & Monica, which I see (hear) from a side-by-side listen is about the arpeggiated figure (if I’ve got the term right) played on what sounds like a harp, or maybe some keyboard—glistening, spidery, quite lovely. Listening more closely, I must admit I found the misspelling of the title setting off frustrated copy editor peeves. It should be and by the usage it is “Cry, Baby,” with or without a comma (author’s choice). I looked up a “lyrics video” to clarify, and things got more confusing as I found it given there as “Oh go on and cry baby, crybaby,” as if the singer is encouraging the display of emotion but also mocking the tearfulness and the crier. But that doesn’t fit with the tone of the song and I’m willing to call more misspellings on the part of the video too. The song, according to Wikipedia and it seems plausible enough because why not, is about toxic masculinity. Says Faith, it’s "a conversation between a man and I, and the song questions whether global conflicts would cease to exist if men successfully dealt with their feelings.” OK, whatever, I don’t hear it that way, but I see the point and it’s fair enough to call the whole thing a muddle. The main point is that it’s a catchy, beautiful, and endearing pop song with the harp figure going and Faith churning it out in full warm clarion voice. I think I’m on board with the general sentiments too but as I say that’s a little muddled. Who cares anyway? A message is not often the point of pop music.

Kesha, “Praying” (2017)

[listen up!]

Curmudgeon incoming: my problems with the pop warbling mode started with Whitney Houston and accelerated in the new century with the coming of TV’s performance competition reality show American Idol, which prized vocal technique and histrionic stagecraft above melody and arrangement. It was deeply alienating for someone reared on the Beatles and Tommy James and, I firmly believe, it’s a misnomer to call it pop music. But by 2017 I was making or trying to make my accommodations and sufficiently softened by then that “Praying” could reach me. It was Kesha’s first single in something like four years. It starts exactly as what I don’t like, all full of its own faux humbleness, with churchy piano chords and Kesha sneaking in at low volume, low energy, laying the ground for the wall of emo to come. I don’t know Kesha’s other work well, but Wikipedia tells me this lead single from her third album can be taken as a departure (from her “dive bar party anthems,” per Vox’s Caroline Framke). Some even characterize “Praying” as a comeback. The high pitch of drama—even the idea that prayer is the recommended necessity for the situation at hand, whatever that somewhat murky situation is exactly—somehow wears down my innate objections, as the overwhelming attack kicks in and washes over me like redemption. When the drums come in full at about 2:25 the song is fully ablaze and roaring. Kesha says it is about forgiving our trespassers. Others hear the calls for forgiveness more as cold brushoff, the moral equivalent of saying “thank you with a capital F.” I mean: “I hope you find your peace / Falling on your knees.” Me, I just get lost in the sweltering gospel texture and hope it works out right for everyone involved. Pray for it, even.

Suicide Commandos, “Try Again” (2017)

[listen up!]

The original Twin Cities punk-rockers, the Suicide Commandos ruled the nascent local scene in the second half of the 1970s, an irresistible live act built out of trash rock ‘n’ roll, heirs to the Trashmen, Monkees, New York Dolls, and others. They entered oblivion as the three principals moved and reinvented themselves in various ways. But punk-rock means never having to say you’re old again just because you’re living forever. Approximately 30 years later the trio reassembled to play comeback gigs, pick up the trash on a stretch of highway in Minnetonka, and, eventually, record another album, Time Bomb. They acquitted themselves well there, with all-original songs and an unmistakable dedication to the ideals of rock ‘n’ roll aging grizzled but still effective, with no overreach, like the old friend of a plainly well-used amplifier they put on the cover of the album. The whole thing is worth checking out. “Try Again” may be as good a place as any to enter in—perhaps one of the best. It’s tidy. It can feel almost effortless. And it sets its hooks deep. With only the preamble of a single drum hit by drummer Dave Ahl it locks into a throbbing groove guaranteed to set heads bobbing. You feel it right away. It bears the potential to grow into something much larger and more significant. The doggy yips no one could have expected only signal the freewheeling dedication to fun—complicated fun, the band’s calling card. “Try Again” is a simple exercise in rock, all sustained control, the singer stalking and riding the surging glides with an air of patience and persistence. Declarations of fidelity like this seem likely to last a lifetime, or at least for the three minutes this song goes. Chris Osgood’s squalling electric guitar answers any remaining questions about this song written by Steve Almaas, my old high school mate who died last week. R.I.P.

Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (2017)

One more entry from the 33-1/3 series of fancy little books from Bloomsbury Publishing devoted to specific albums. This one is by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero, taking on the strangely beautiful and only album by Young Marble Giants, the Welsh minimalist trio who were briefly darlings in postpunk circles. It answered lots of my questions about the band and the album, including at least one I thought had no answer. First, both “young marble giants” and “colossal youth” are references to ancient Greek sculptures from circa 500 BCE called “kouroi,” depicting larger-than-life-size nude adolescent boys and girls. The statues can be as high as 10 feet. One of the Moxham brothers, Stuart or Philip, found a book about them and was fascinated. The third principal, singer Alison Statton, worked as a dental technician during the band’s heyday and is now a chiropractor. The answer I thought I’d never get is that Pedro Costa’s 2006 Portuguese movie Colossal Youth is indeed related to the album somehow. Released as Juventude em Marcha ("Youth on the March"), Costa, the picture’s director, writer, and co-cinematographer, specifically requested that releases in English-speaking countries bear the title Colossal Youth, harking to the album. Unfortunately, while this book is heavily footnoted, no source is given on this point, and little explanation of Costa’s reason. In fact, Blair and Bocciero seem mystified about it themselves, though convinced of the connection. I’ll take them at their word. This book reminded me of Geeta Dayal’s fine treatment in this series of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. It largely eschews personal anecdotes of their history with the album, replacing it with a lot of probing and erudite discussion of its purpose and sources. Colossal Youth really is a lovely and special album and I was grateful just for being sent back to it again. I like the way Blair and Bucciero cast the net wide to place this album culturally. Susan Sontag is mentioned a lot, as are Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds. Usual suspects all, but Blair and Bucciero make use of them judiciously. This is a surprisingly rare thing in this series—a text that is a worthy companion to the album, enlightening and informative.

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

Wonderstruck (2017)

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

Twin Peaks (2017)

[Earlier review here.]

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

Director: David Lynch

Writers: Mark Frost, David Lynch

Photography: Peter Deming

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

Editor: Duwayne Dunham

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

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

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

Get Out (2017)

[First review here.]

USA / Japan, 104 minutes

Director/writer: Jordan Peele

Photography: Toby Oliver

Music: Michael Abels, Childish Gambino

Editor: Gregory Plotkin

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, LaKeith Stanfield, Betty Gabriel, Marcus Henderson, Stephen Root, Lil Rel Howery

[spoilers] The making of Get Out spanned the transition from the Obama to the Trump era in the US, which affected Get Out directly in terms of the way it ended. The streaming version available via Amazon Prime includes an alternate ending with explanatory voiceover from director and writer Jordan Peele, turning to horror movies after a lifetime of comedy. This career shift may not be as radical as, say, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who transitioned from comedy into national wartime leader. But it’s pretty radical, especially given that Peele’s horror movies are not just there for the sensations—though they are generally quite good at sensations—but also as a forum to discuss and enlighten contemporary and ancient racial issues. Get Out is consciously “woke” before that term was coopted and distorted by rightwing dullards. Indeed, Peele chose the Childish Gambino song “Redbone” to play with the titles at the beginning of the movie in part because the song’s chorus urges us to “stay woke.”

Get Out is also funny, with a premise that is sitcom gold: Black boyfriend Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is being taken Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner style by his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) to meet her family in a distant, affluent New York suburb. Chris has his concerns about how they will take him as a Black man, but Rose tells him not to worry. They’re not racist. They would have voted for Obama for a third term if they could have, which her father Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon, later confirms word for word. But once there we see Chris had good reason for concern. The white family is awkwardly welcoming but can’t help constantly revealing their unconscious racism, of which the Obama comment is a great example. But there are more disturbing undercurrents as well, more than Chris or any of us might have expected, such as Black servants who are hostile and zombie-like by turns. There’s often an uneasy sense of just how isolated this place is.

Zama (2017)

Argentina / Brazil / Spain / Dominican Republic / France / Netherlands / Mexico / Switzerland / USA / Portugal / Lebanon, 115 minutes

Director: Lucrecia Martel

Writers: Antonio Di Benedetto, Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Rui Pocas

Music: Ernesto Lecuona

Editors: Karen Harley, Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Daniel Giminez Cacho, Lola Duenas, Matheus Nachtergaele, Juan Minujin, Rafael Spregelburd, Daniel Veronese, Nahuel Cano

Zama is a historical drama set in an outpost on the sea of colonial Argentina, late in the 18th century. Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho, virtually carrying the whole thing though well supported) is a Spanish magistrate who can’t catch a break: the woman he wants to seduce rejects him for another, the governors to whom he reports will not act on his request for a transfer, and, more than anything (though somewhat hypocritically), he longs to be reunited with his wife and family. Gimenez Cacho puts on a face of long suffering as he suffers long, enduring the indignities heaped on him, finally, perhaps, earning redemption, but at a very high cost.

The first half of Zama is largely focused on the absurdities of the colonial enterprise, with features like enslaving natives often part of it. Zama hears the complaints of one couple who operate a plantation. They had to deal with a series of native uprisings, forced finally to the most extreme measures. “None were spared,” the woman reports. “And now there’s no one left to work.” They seem to have no compunctions about their request for “40 tame Indians,” which they feel is the least the Spanish administration can do for them. So go the travails of the colonialist. Zama is part of it, enmeshed in it however he might actually feel about it, however much he intends to get out. He opts to work within the system toward this end, for example betraying a colleague in a vain attempt to please a capricious governor. The governor who moves him to poorer quarters.

The Shape of Water (2017)

USA / Mexico, 123 minutes

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Photography: Dan Laustsen

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Sidney Wolinsky

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Doug Jones, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lauren Lee Smith, Nick Searcy, David Hewlett

I took a second look at The Shape of Water the other day and found my original review basically covered all the main points I have to make (it’s linked down there at #5 in the list below). It’s still a monster movie that makes me cry. The period detail—early-‘60s US Cold War—is still on the nose (in the Urban Dictionary sense of “unsubtle or overly and clumsily direct” as opposed to the older sense, which is its opposite, “precisely correct” ... how do these things in language happen? Compare the verb “table”). And Sally Hawkins particularly but the whole cast is still tremendously good. After Pacific Rim it’s probably my favorite movie I’ve seen by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro. So see the movie. Read my original review.

This second time through I had occasion to think about my problems with del Toro, whose work has been so disappointing so often I have tended to avoid it, and thus have many many gaps with him. I just realized now, for example, he did Nightmare Alley (which came out totally in the middle of Covid ... I still haven’t been back to a movie theater, but soon). Anyway, I know this is chatty and all over the place, I have plans to write about Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio soon and I should probably look at del Toro’s Pinocchio for that. Oh heck, I probably should have looked at it for this. A second look at The Shape of Water helped clarify some of the problem. It’s not so much anything to do with del Toro. It’s on me, or mostly.

The Ritual (2017)

The Ritual has a simple and effective premise and then layers on some psychological complexity and a bunch of far-out folk horror tropes from the northlands. It's a pretty good ride. A group of college buddies are on a hiking vacation in northern Sweden. The men are in their 30s and old friends but inevitably there are weird frictions among them, set in motion or revealed months earlier when one of them is killed by random violence in an armed robbery. Another of them is in the liquor store with him during the holdup, but so paralyzed by fear that he does nothing but watch as his friend is murdered. Now he feels guilty and the incident is one of the sources of unease among the group. Once they are well along the hiking trail one of them twists a knee and is barely able to continue. They are far from help and decide, rather than continuing the loop trail they are on, to take a more direct route back through unmarked woods. Obviously these guys are behind on their folk horror studies and don't know how dangerous it is to hike through woods like that in northern Sweden. They don't particularly know where they are but use a compass to attempt going in a straight line in the direction that will get them back. They find strange markings on trees, apparently abandoned cabins, and scary figures constructed of tree branches, antlers, and who knows what. They find a recently slaughtered elk, the blood still dripping off it, impaled on branches far above the forest floor. Dark catches them and they decide to spend a night in one of the cabins, which they have to break into. They all have bad dreams that night, and worse. There also seems to be some kind of creature roaming these woods, roaring and breaking things. It's hard to make it out. From that point, in many ways The Ritual takes on the structure of a slasher picture, as the hikers are picked off one by one (in grotesque but generally creative ways) until finally there is only one "Final Girl" left—not a girl, these are all guys in their 30s, but you get my point. It sounds like predictable fare and IMDb viewers rank it at only an aggregated 6.3 (I gave it an 8.0). In fairness, it more or less is predictable, at least in broad strokes. But screenwriter Joe Barton and director David Bruckner have wound this story up pretty tight, with a nice transition from the urban horrors of armed robbery and its aftermath to the ancient forces at work in the dark woods, and they keep springing surprises. The monster, the backstory, a backwoods clan who worship the thing and perform sacrifices for it—all this unfolds naturally in escalating scenes of tension that make it harder and harder to watch this in any kind of free and easy way. It's definitely one worth going back for if you missed it and like gnawing anxiety. For faint of heart details, see the DoestheDogDie report.

Wormwood (2017)

For the most part I have been out of step with many fans of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who directed this Netflix miniseries in typical fashion for him. His breakthrough picture for most—The Thin Blue Line (1988)—also happens to be where he lost me, though his previous films (Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida) certainly had their own problems. With The Thin Blue Line, Morris adopted a more sincere, crusading journalist approach even as he indulged various arty cinematic impulses, which have dogged his work (and apparently impressed the critics) ever since. Wormwood is a great example of both. On the journalist side, he takes on the case of Frank Olson, a CIA scientist specializing in biological warfare who died under mysterious, unexplained circumstances in 1953. Morris works with Olson's son Eric, who was a young boy at the time of his father's death and has spent much of his life trying to get to the bottom of it. In many ways Morris even shows up the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who once called the Olsons the most "uncurious" family he'd ever heard of for accepting the CIA's first account of the death, which is that Olson "fell or jumped" from a 10th-floor hotel room in some kind of terrible accident, smashing the window on his way out. Hersh made his observation of the Olsons in 1975, when a second version of the story came out. Now we were told that Olson had been surreptitiously dosed with LSD in a CIA experiment, subsequently suffered a mental breakdown, and now his death was called a suicide. This is the story that a curiously uncurious Hersh believed until circa 2014, when Eric Olson personally challenged him with his own theory that the CIA murdered his father. This had somehow never occurred to Hersh, who checked with a source and within 48 hours could confirm the murder, though he could not give any more detail than that for fear of burning his source. In many ways, Morris the journalist is thus able to paint himself as superior even to Hersh, who does not come across well in this documentary.

On the cinema side, meanwhile, Wormwood is Morris at his best or worst, depending on your view. It's full of art and cinema: slo-mo reenactments with Hollywood stars, brooding layers of text and images, fancy transitions, clips from practically every movie anyone mentions, some pretty good pop music, a whole treatment of Hamlet (from which the title among other things), etc., etc. It took me until the last episode to notice the clock in the room where the lengthy interview with Eric Olson took place is stopped at 2:35—the time his father died in 1953. That's all clever and good, but at four hours this six-part epic miniseries is just way too long, and a lot of it is padding. As a reviewer says on IMDb, there's an excellent 90-minute documentary here lost in the caverns of overproduction. Eric gets to make a pretty good case that his father was killed by the CIA, but Morris's intention seems to be more along the lines of wondering what we can ever really know for sure. Certainly this is one of those cases where it seems likely we will never know the whole story. At least, perhaps, Eric got the chance to argue convincingly for murder, in what has turned out to consume his whole life. He may have got some closure or satisfaction with this version of the story (certainly in regard to Hersh), but sadly, Wormwood is mostly more of a wasted opportunity.

Phantom Thread (2017)

USA / UK, 130 minutes

Director/writer/photography: Paul Thomas Anderson

Music: Jonny Greenwood

Editor: Dylan Tichenor

Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville

Phantom Thread is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie about a very fine dressmaker and fashion designer, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), who is living, working, and fussing in postwar midcentury London with his sister and manager, Cyril (Lesley Manville). It's a quiet, elegant picture, and boomers particularly are likely to find ecstasies of nostalgia in the period work, though much of it is interiors and costumes, with some cars, servants, and the usual exquisite manners. I took it in 2017, and in many ways still, as artifact of the same Anglophile impulse that has made people big fans of Downton Abbey, The Crown, and other such productions adoring of all things British. I admit I didn't give Phantom Thread much of a chance.

On a second look, it seems more remarkably eccentric, with a strangely perverse love story, a bit like Punch-Drunk Love. The rowdy Adam Sandler has been replaced by the suave consummate Laurence Olivier of our very own era. I'm not sure that works either but it's more interesting than I originally gave the movie credit for. Emily Watson and Vicky Krieps play similarly robotic, vaguely alien yet lovely creatures, which probably tells us more about PTA than about either story. I'm taking the title of Phantom Thread to mean the tenuous connections between people more than anything about sewing and needles, and I'm starting to think Anderson is more like a novelist taking it directly to film.

You Were Never Really Here (2017)

Director and screenwriter Lynne Ramsay's movies tend to be intense affairs, even as they come spaced years apart (Morvern Callar from 2002, We Need to Talk About Kevin from 2011). In terms of the intensity, much the same can be said about Joaquin Phoenix, who is plainly seeking challenges: Joker, The Master, I'm Still Here (a controversial mockumentary about Phoenix's supposed turn to hip-hop whose title may or may not have anything to do with this one), and even reaching way back to Walk the Line and Clay Pigeons. Phoenix often does a convincing dance with baffled rage. Between Ramsay and Phoenix, there's a certain amount of promise going into You Were Never Really Here even before you get to the premise. Phoenix plays Joe, a paranoid loner and righteous freelance security expert who lives with his mother and specializes in rescuing girls from underground sex trafficking rings and other problems. He works outside of the law and he's known for being competent, efficient, and brutal. In 2017, Jeffrey Epstein was not quite the true-crime media lodestar he has become since last year in his well-deserved disgrace and problematic death (with the story continuing this summer as his sidekick and Dump's fond wish Ghislaine Maxwell has been arrested and is now more or less officially on a national death watch). In that way maybe you can even argue tor the prescience of You Were Never Really Here. I have to say there is a lot of Martin Scorsese all over it. Joe is plainly a version of Travis Bickle. He has semi-suicidal impulses based on childhood trauma, information about which comes to us in fragments. When he wraps his head in plastic for as long as can stand the troubled breathing it reminded me of Harvey Keitel's Charlie in Mean Streets, idly holding his hands over open flames as long as he could, imagining the afterlife. The whole situation of rescuing a young girl from the life, using all violence necessary, is straight out of Taxi Driver. It even makes eerie, excellent, but Scorsese-like use of the song "Angel Baby" by Rosie & the Originals, which was also used in Scorsese's After Hours, Dennis Hopper's Colors, and Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day (and a handful of others too, it's popular!). Ramsay's picture also reminded me a little of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive from several years back and also of Claire Denis's White Material. Tough stuff. You Were Never Really Here may not be as original as Ramsay's others (notably Kevin) but it is harrowing good stuff, a rocking thriller ride made out of a fierce combination of editing, performance, and dark vision. It goes over the top at will—two exhausted hitmen lying on a kitchen floor, one dying, mumble-sing together the chorus of Charlene's treacly '70s hit, "I've Never Been to Me," which happens to be playing nearby. I mean, come on! Yet somehow this picture can even make that work. Worth tracking down if you missed it like me.

Dreaming the Beatles (2017)

Rob Sheffield takes possession of the Beatles in a deceptively effortless way. He's a little defensive on some of his points, forcefully turning his 1966 birthdate into an advantage rather than disadvantage (a little like me arguing for possession of Louis Jordan, but OK). His starting point, much like Greil Marcus's for Elvis Presley in Dead Elvis, is that the Beatles never stopped growing and being important just because the band broke up. His most persuasive argument for me was simply pointing out that the album 1, released in 2000—a collection of the Beatles' 27 #1 hits, which everybody who cared had to own by then—has been the best-selling album for most of this century so far (it's now #2 after Adele's 21, which only overtook it this year). Sheffield covers all the familiar ground here: Ed Sullivan, the movies, Bob Dylan, Rubber Soul and Revolver, Jesus, the White Album, etc. He is particularly good on Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, with one of the best analyses of that album and its place I've seen. Then, without so much as a speed bump, he carries on talking about the solo careers in the '70s and early nostalgia products such as the Red Album and Blue Album. This was the most surprising and even refreshing view for me—every time he casually zigged and zagged between '60s Beatles and '70s Beatles I had to reorient a little. I like many of the solo Beatles albums (and I like Double Fantasy a good deal more than he does) but I have always seen a bright line between the Beatles and what came after. But I'm convinced now he's right. The Beatles were unimaginably huge in their time. We've seen nothing like it since in popular culture. Yet they have become even bigger since. By the one obvious measure, for most of the 21st century, which started 30 years after they broke up and one of them dead, they owned the #1 album. Getting down to cases with this book—which is a pleasure to read—I find myself closer to Sheffield than I would have imagined, but often with strong disagreements too. He's a John Lennon / Rubber Soul partisan whereas I had made him for Paul McCartney / White Album. He actually went down the anti-Paul road with the rest of us, turning it around finally (as the new majority coalition coalesced) in the '90s (I was a little slower). I like George more than he does and he likes Ringo more than I do. He is vastly more versed on the lore, the bootlegs, and YouTube videos. There was a lot for me to learn here. I had already learned, maybe with Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head (on which Sheffield sounds a little dubious), that there's always more to learn with the Beatles, and infinitely more variation in taste on specific cases. Ultimately I think Dreaming the Beatles is a bit of an odd duck—I worry that like 1991's Dead Elvis it is actually heralding the beginning of the end—but it definitely belongs in the canon of Beatles literature.

In case it's not at the library.

Gargoyle (2017)

I'm a little embarrassed but more surprised than anything to realize it's been nearly 20 years and four albums since I checked in with Mark Lanegan. He doesn't sound much different, which might be a little underhanded to observe, but I like what he does and it's easy to make a habit of listening to this album regularly, the way Field Songs worked the last time, or Whiskey for the Holy Ghost or The Winding Sheet before. It's doomy and moody and full of dramatic gesture, modulating sound levels the way grungers always like, granite faces to the powerful north wind, rock band, eternity, etc. Bring in the goats. As always, Lanegan is willing to let it swell up with keyboards, strings, and of course big guitar chords, counterparting with his rumbling whiskey soak vocal. And he does get to emotional moments, affecting ones. The songs are often rich with juicy melody too, as in the epic "Nocturne," with its Joy Division flourishes and surrender to all that is lovely. Gargoyle topics under consideration: death, drinking, mysterious mirrors, midnight encounters, holy love at will, setting the sky on fire, reeling empire, Paul Bowles scenes under a stark tropic moon (or the equivalents as rendered from drug haze). There's much more in the way of keyboards on this album than I recall from Lanegan before, straying toward Ultravox by way of Philip Glass on "Blue Blue Sea," for example. The album is not always hitting on all cylinders and can go flat in places, which only means it's a typical album in a lot of ways. "Nocturne" might be the only song that really sends me, but there are some whompers that can get you one way or another, either with sweet wheedling or blunt force, such as "Emperor" (lifting from Iggy Pop's "The Passenger") and the convincingly bittersweet "Goodbye to Beauty." The finish is "Old Swan," the last and longest song on the album, which sets up a pretty big play, martial rhythms and swirling guitars spiraling higher, higher. "Take me in your arms, let me live again." Yeah, there we go. To the stratosphere and a long fade. Must have something to do with Zeus.

How Did I Find Myself Here? (2017)

It's honestly amazing to me that a Dream Syndicate album, comeback or otherwise, must now be filed under geezer-rock, especially given that I felt like a bit of a geezer myself already when I first encountered the band in my late 20s. But here we are, decades past the last release. Good luck and Godspeed (from the day late and dollar short). Because it has one song, "80 West," that instantly and reliably evokes everything I love about Dream Syndicate, the album met all my cautious expectations and then some. The loping bass, the thundering guitars and their righteous whine, the film noir drug addict mumble of Steve Wynn through the unruly disarray—it's all there. Play loud. Go do it now. There's a bonus in the longish (6:22) and poignant close to the album, "Kendra's Dream," an ode to former bandmate Kendra Smith that is quite insinuatingly beautiful. I like "Glide" too but in terms of the quality that's where I think How Did I Find Myself Here? starts to slide into the rest of the album, which is more on the order of weaker versions of the best of Dream Syndicate. The title song, evidently intended as a kind of definitive statement, coming in at a stately Coltrane-like 11:13, is ambitious and occasionally interesting—notably when it resorts to figures from the Grateful Dead's classic 1969 performance of "Dark Star"—but more often it is straining for effect. As, I'm afraid, does much of the album. After "80 West" and "Kendra's Dream," approach with caution.

South and West (2017)

It's tempting to get excited and jump up and down and want to compare Joan Didion's latest, some notebook writing from the '70s, with something like VU and Another View, the lost Velvet Underground albums that emerged in the mid-'80s. That might be overstating, but the key is that this is way good stuff, from arguably the peak of her writing powers, and with those powers on display. It's two separate sets of notes for pieces Didion never wrote, one from 1970 as she traveled the South, the other from 1976 in California, revolving around Patty Hearst. The first part, on the South, is much the bulk of the book and the best part too. The California stuff is more like a reprisal of her 2003 meditation on California, Where I Was From. But Joan Didion (and John Gregory Dunne) traveling the South in 1970 is priceless. All the book's blurbers want it to be a prescient look into America's future, which no one in 1970 expected. But all the cant and rhetoric of reflexive patriotism and instant dismissal of progressive ideas on moral grounds already lived in the South of 1970. It's probably more fair to say it never stopped living there in the first place. If anything, it was more raw back then. School integration is not just a fresh topic, but still ongoing. And the wearisome oppression of the South by political correctness is well underway. Natives, such as the white owner of a radio station in Meridian, Mississippi, that features black music, speak warily of racial issues, apparently trying to tone down the racism, apparently without knowing how to, leading to some tendency for an aggrieved defensive tone. At the same time it's also comically apparent that Didion's arrogance and "coastal elitism" (scare quotes) are just as much in play in these encounters, even through the screen of her own writing. Joan Didion is a bit of a name-dropper and usually haughty about food. She also reviews the swimming pools at the motels they stay in, a telltale preoccupation. It's possible that, in the editing, some of the Blue v. Red contrasts that define all American politics today and have reached such a toxic new crescendo with the rise of Donald Trump may have been sharpened for the sake of our era. Of course, these notebook passages are as crystalline as all Didion prose. She went to the South in 1970 looking for antecedents to the culture of the West, where so many Southerners moved after the Civil War. She contrasts the sense of the burden of history in the South with the attempt to erase history in the West. As usual, the greatest pleasures are in Didion's sharp, acerbic eye and ear for details. This book is too short, and somewhat uneven, but so were those lost Velvet Underground albums.

In case it's not at the library.

Complicated Fun (2017)

This nicely done oral history of the Minneapolis (and St. Paul) pop / punk / hardcore / alternative music scene really brought me back. I was only on the fringes for most of the '70s, even though a few of the bands breaking out of it included people I knew and was friendly with. As I learned here, a tremendous amount happened before I finally circled back in about 1979. It sounds like such great times, with the Suicide Commandos and Flamingo ruling the Longhorn nightclub that gave birth to so much of it. The Suburbs, the Wallets, NNB, the Hypstrz, and Curtiss A were not far behind, and it's arguable all that paved the way for Husker Du and the Replacements in the '80s. Cyn Collins has done a great job of figuring out who to talk to, and then of getting them to talk. Conspicuous in his absence is Prince, who was a respected but distant figure in all this. It was probably wise. The worlds of Prince and the axis of the Longhorn, Oar Folkjokeopus record store, and Twin/Tone indie label were always separate and distinct. The scope of Prince's talent quickly put him in another class entirely, with Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and the world. The great pleasure of this oral history, as with most oral histories, is the mix of distinctive voices. It's full of great stories of things happening by chance, things going wrong, and things you almost can't imagine. It's best on the Suicide Commandos, Suburbs, and NNB, but that might be because I knew some of them and liked those bands best. It scrubs out a lot of ugly details—petty squabbles that became long-term fractures—which again is wise. Why raise old ghosts? By the '80s that's a little tougher to do because bands had ambitions and expectations by then that didn't always bear out, and it's harder to gloss over some ill feelings that are perhaps still operative. Nothing is heard from any of the principals of Husker Du or the Replacements, who have had their own biographies and memoirs in recent years, and there aren't as many stories about them here in general. I wished for a little more there but I know it is adequately documented elsewhere. But the period of 1974 to 1979—a New York Dolls performance at the Minnesota State Fair in 1974 is given as the figurative ground zero—has certainly been underrepresented until now. Complicated Fun is detailed, informative, always fun, and fleshes out the story of Twin Cities music in key ways. Essential, certainly if you grew up there at the time.

In case it's not at the library.

Time Bomb (2017)

I don't keep careful track of such things, but surely the 39 years that passed between the first album by the Suicide Commandos and this second one must be some statistical record. Even Paul McCartney and Santana came up short of 30 years between top 10 hits ("Spies Like Us" and "FourFive Seconds" for the one and "Black Magic Woman" and "Smooth" for the other). At this point I know it's mandatory to mention whether it was worth the wait, but as far as I'm concerned, like the 2015 This Is the Sonics, I'm just happy they did it—"rage against the dying of the light," you know. The fact that Time Bomb is a pretty good album is a bonus. The Suicide Commandos, the Minneapolis mid-'70s punk-rock standard-bearers (accept no substitutes), were matched in 1978 with Cleveland's finest, Pere Ubu, on the Mercury subsidiary label Blank (not to be confused with Glenn Danzig's original Misfits project). That first Commandos album, Make a Record, was released simultaneously with Pere Ubu's first, The Modern Dance. Pere Ubu went on to the more illustrious career, and the truth is in 1978 the Commandos were close to calling it quits for almost two decades. Make a Record was a pretty good album too—packed with great, classic songs from their set list—but it was unfortunately dogged by a poor recording. That problem has certainly been addressed on Time Bomb, which is as explosive as the title suggests, crackling with energy, power, and clarity. A more nebulous problem has also been fixed: the three principals—drummer Dave Ahl, bassist Steve Almaas, and guitarist Chris Osgood—seem to like each other more than they did in 1978. The humor is still intact too, based on misspent youth watching trashy movies and playing Monkees records, and they generally rock the house with authority all night from track to track.

If the album consists mostly of solo songwriting credits, the attack of the band is as sharp as ever, updated to beyond middle age, for a seamless batch that's nice to play a lot. And there are a couple of formal collaborations, including one of the best songs here, "If I Can't Make You Love Me," with a monster riff straight from the '70s (is that Bad Company? Thin Lizzy? Aerosmith? I know I should know it) and garbled adolescent sentiments ("you're an idiot, shitty-it, itty-bitty fitty-it," innit?). All my favorites have big riffs and hark to classic-rock or even, dare I say it, boogie. If I had to pick a single favorite it would probably be Osgood's "Pool Palace Cigar," a devil's riff by way of ZZ Top paired with a narrative about traveling through small towns trying to act cool and getting drunk—perfect. His "Boogie's Coldest Acre" is another good one, complete with a classic Osgood riff. This time the boogie mainly exists in the title. The song appears to be about a dangerous situation that needs to be defused. It comes in versions with and without swearing—"put that thing down" versus "put that fucking thing down"—and for some reason (maybe because I'm 39 years older now too) I like the one without swearing more. "Cocktail Shaker" is by Ahl and works more swampy boogie rhythms, with a sinuous guitar line and a way of moving, stopping, and starting that is propulsive. "Depth charge rock" I wrote in a note. All together: "Shake!" Ahl likes his trash culture and Osgood tended to favor the story song, whereas Almaas (full disclosure, a high school friend) has long seemed more rooted in the Buddy Holly / Beatles / Byrds schools of country-inflected pop. A few of his songs here—notably "Try Again," "For Such a Mean Time" (Byrds strained through Cyril Jordan Flamin' Groovies), and "The Wrong Time"—tend to be the ones that make me happiest coming back to the album regularly. His "When I Do It, It's OK" comes out of the same high-velocity kick as the Beatles' "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" and other '50s covers. Time Bomb: Play loud. All of it.

Nico, 1988 (2017)

Nico, 1988 suffers from the usual limitations of biopics—a certain inevitable self-satisfaction, and if you know anything about the subject you already know where it's all headed. But credit where due: director and screenwriter Susanna Nicchiarelli has stitched together a lot of effective elements, focusing on the end of the line for Nico (born Christa Paffgen), who died in 1988. Trine Dyrholm delivers a convincing and affecting Nico, there's some nice support from John Gordon Sinclair (Gregory in Gregory's Girl) and Karina Fernandez (Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year), and the band—an Italian post-rock outfit called Gatto Ciliegia contro il Grande Freddo—is much better than the treatment Nico is shown giving them. Indeed, it is perhaps better than the actual thing, in the way biopics exaggerate and heighten for effect. I seem to know a lot of people who saw Nico on her endless tour in the '80s and the reports are never good, telling tales of a disgruntled middle-aged heroin addict making music with strange uneven powers who couldn't accept that her moment came and went when she played a tambourine and sang with the Velvet Underground (there's a great moment here when someone seems to have her confused with Marianne Faithfull or Anita Pallenberg).  My turn was at Duffy's in Minneapolis in something like 1982. She was pumping at a harmonium on her own while people catcalled for songs they had to know she couldn't do, like "Heroin." That show did not last long, cut off when she left the stage abruptly, angry about something. I think we got five songs. In this movie, the shows are short too. But the high point of the picture is one of them, a mysterious show in Prague in 1986. It's cut short by the appearance of Soviet Czechoslovakian police to hassle the promoter. Nico and at least one other member of the band are suffering withdrawal symptoms because they could not bring heroin across the border and haven't been able to find any there. Nico takes to the stage shaky and coated in a thin film of sweat. They play one song, "My Heart Is Empty," before they have to flee the hall altogether. It is an amazing, roaring performance—I wish I could look at it over and over again tonight. (It has not yet made it to YouTube, but there's a snippet.) Otherwise, Nico, 1988 explores Nico's experience in Berlin as a girl at the end of World War II for general purposes of psychological motivation, and does a bit of dancing around with her white supremacist ways, though not enough. There's also some stuff about her son and her death in 1988, at 49. I wish there had been more of that band.