Safe (1995)

UK/USA, 119 minutes
Director/writer: Todd Haynes
Photography: Alex Nepomniaschy
Music: Ed Tomney
Editor: James Lyons
Cast: Julianne Moore, Xander Berkeley, Ronnie Farer, Jessica Harper, James LeGros, Peter Friedman, Mary Carver, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Chauncey Leopardi, Steven Gilborn, John Apicella, Eleanor Graham

Safe is maddeningly good at being hard to pin down. It's one of the things I like most about it, but it's also the source of its greatest weakness, which is a tendency to look like it's making broad plays for ironic laughs, particularly in its second half, finding an all too easy target in the self-actualization preoccupations and clichés of its late-'80s Southern California setting. This is unfortunate because the movie is much more often, particularly in its first half, deadly serious about articulating what I might as well call a spiritual malaise. Here it is referred to as "environmental illness," the term of art in the period of the film for an evident immune-system condition that still hasn't been scientifically validated, but has traveled under many names: chemical sensitivity, 20th century syndrome, sick building syndrome, and, currently, multiple chemical sensitivity.

I know this disease and apparently so do director/writer Todd Haynes and Julianne Moore, who plays the victim here, Carol White, in an amazing turn. This disease is there in all the scenes of Los Angeles freeway traffic, at dusk, at night, in the day, crawling along in haze. It's there in the nightmares of parking garages. It's there in the power-line towers and handfuls of parallel lines draped and running ubiquitously overhead. It's there in the interiors of the fine San Fernando Valley homes, stuffed with treated fabrics, cleaning chemicals, molded plastics, body scents, and servants in uniform. And it's there in one of the picture's canniest elements, its sound design, which simply records the ambient noise that surrounds us constantly: the drone of planes overhead, the whine of vacuum cleaners, the washes of traffic's white noise, the radios and televisions playing in the background of so many interiors, including AM talk radio in one memorable scene inside a car.

Rod Stewart, "Gasoline Alley" (1970)

(listen)

This has long been a favorite for me by Rod Stewart, even for this period, which I have to admit, exhaustion notwithstanding, on the two albums Gasoline Alley and Every Picture Tells a Story it all pretty much comes in shades of excellence. We know that because people have been shouty about it for better than 40 years and also the radio bludgeoning. I don't have much to add except agreement. It may not amount to some of the outsize things people falling all over themselves have claimed for it (and him). And it may not sound as fresh as it once did—it definitely fits now with a lot of stuff recorded 1968-1972 as sounding exactly as if it were recorded 1968-1972. Maybe that's the exhaustion from the overexposure talking, but I don't think so. At the same time, it sounds positively ancient, built on an eerie vibration more apt to be found somewhere strange like a cemetery in the middle of the night. Much of that resides in the sound of Stewart's singing voice, the grain of it. But all hands know what they're doing here, and that goes for Stewart too. He's blessed with this voice, but he knows how to use it. The result is profoundly yet indeterminately authentic, conjuring impressions of Irish immigrants in the Midwest, field workers in the 19th-century South, mountain men in the Rockies in the 1840s, the Jesse James gang, so on and so forth. It's extraordinary—I seem to be falling all over myself. And I think the tension still works. Where once this confounded by sounding impossibly fresh and ancient, now the effect is achieved by sounding just a little dated (1968-1972) and impossibly ancient. This is a good trick to have in your bag.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

#18: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Until the legions of imitators came along in Quentin Tarantino's wake, I'm not sure anyone ever made movies the way Sergio Leone did. Now it sometimes seems like everyone does, but the original remains the best. His forte was visuals, cunningly edited—giant Cinemascope images of vast empty landscapes alternating with close-ups of craggy faces, equally vast and empty, and as imposing as mountains. Dialogue is at a minimum; long sections could probably get away with intertitles. But he was no throwback to silent movies, as his sound designs are integral to his storytelling, whether it's a windmill in need of oil, the whining echoes of gunfire, or the fly buzzing that Emily Dickinson knew. His collaborations with composer Ennio Morricone—particularly in Once Upon a Time in the West, where each of four characters arrive with individualized musical themes, which interact and develop as they do—are uniquely memorable and perhaps his single greatest achievement.

In fact, it was the theme song that drew me in the first place to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which seems to be the one I return to most. As a junior high kid I was lost in the glacial pace of this nearly three-hour picture (the back end of a trilogy with A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More), but my interest picked up considerably whenever the theme started playing again. The scene that's most striking to me now (not available that I could find on YouTube) involves a group of POWs ordered to play music to mask the sounds of torture. The song they play, "La historia de un soldado," is immeasurably sad, and even as they play it they are immeasurably sad too. The way it's staged and cut is absurd and moving all at once, a trick Leone manages to play over and over again in his pictures.

The Aspern Papers (1888)

With the middle period of Henry James full upon us here I found myself thinking less of Jane Austen—though she remains at the heart, to be sure, with all the complexities of Europeanized family relations and especially romance—and more of Vladimir Nabokov. There are clearly antecedents for Pale Fire in "The Aspern Papers" with its oversized lionized hero of a 19th-century poet, Jeffrey Aspern by name, and the literary critic (who narrates the long tale but never once reveals his name) who lusts for some of Aspern's letters, which are in the possession of a broken-down ancient mistress of Aspern's living her latter days in a Venice palazzo with her hapless niece. The various intrigues between the critic and the niece remind me of those between Humbert Humbert and Lolita's mother in that novel too. But the reverberations can be felt elsewhere as well, including one scene that could have inspired significant parts of Susanna Clarke's odd fat fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. James is in full control of his powers here, letting the long sentences and long paragraphs flow like warm water into a bath. One luxuriates in the comic punch carried by a sure-handed narrative momentum. It is funny and fascinating all at once, these ribald adventures of the literary critic, and towards the end there is a flash of the ghost story in a fierce memorable scene when all has unraveled and gone wrong. What I love about stories like this and Pale Fire is how they consciously set out to transform the dreary grinding life of the literary academic (as I imagine it), recasting it as brash and heroic. At the same time it never loses sight of what it is actually about and thus often proves to be very funny for all its sly sense of its own absurdity. What I know about James for myself is that I have a real preference for these middle-period works (e.g., Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady), which are straightforward enough, or anyway with his impulses to shade and dither held in check by his equal devotion to getting a story told. "The Aspern Papers" makes evident that it doesn't have to be a story of great moment at all—no swashbuckling adventures ever, and even the greatest romances puckered by a knowing irony, even cynicism. "The Aspern Papers" is fully engaging, often very funny, and with an ending that only unfolds to even greater depths of implication.

"interlocutor" count = 3/85 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Music for Parties (1980)

The Silicon Teens takes the drift of the Monkees and the Archies to a logical conclusion, teaming up four people—Darryl, Jacki, Paul, and Diane, by name—who not only are not musicians, nor even human, but in fact do not exist at all. Which sure explains the lack of last names for one thing. In fact, it is a larky one-off goof project by Daniel Miller, one man alone with his thoughts in a studio, which he did shortly before starting up the Mute label, whose acts included Depeche Mode, Erasure, and Yazoo. When you think about all those things you won't be surprised to find out what Music for Parties is. Bouncy-ball synthpop covers of rock 'n' roll and/or top 40 pop standards plus a handful of originals with vaguely sinister garage gestures. So let's see here, "Memphis," "Doo Wah Diddy Diddy," "You Really Got Me," "Judy in Disguise," "Sweet Little Sixteen," do you see what I am talking about yet? It really blipped in and out fast in 1980. I found out about it when a friend pulled it out of the library of a radio station. I don't remember ever reading much about it. But I loved it immediately and intensely for a few weeks. Eventually I forgot about it until I ran across a download back in the days of mp3 blogging, and wow, flipped for it all over again. The act's biggest claim to fame has its origins on this, their only album, in the cover of "Red River Rock," which caught the attention of John Hughes, who ordered up a rerecorded version for the opening titles of 1987's Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. I like it a lot, especially the album version here (movie version can be heard here). As long as I have your attention on this matter I'd also like to commend one of the originals, the instrumental "State of Shock (pt. 2)." There does not appear to be a "State of Shock (pt. 1)," at least not on the album. It seems to me that this is as it should be. It's real outer space spy movie stuff, with lovely tones and textures to some of the bouncy-ball parts of it. Well, all parts of it are the bouncy-ball parts if you know what I mean, but it really gets itself going on a little head of steam, and builds from there. It's so easy to be infatuated with this and then forget it utterly for decades. So give it a listen now (here). You can thank me in 2044, if you remember.

Talk to Her (2002)

Hable con ella, Spain, 112 minutes
Director/writer: Pedro Almodovar
Photography: Javier Aguirresarobe
Music: Alberto Iglesias
Editor: Jose Salcedo
Cast: Javier Cámara, Darío Grandinetti, Leonor Watling, Rosario Flores, Mariola Fuentes, Geraldine Chaplin, Fele Martínez, Paz Vega, Caetono Veloso, Ana Fernandez, Chus Lampreave, Esther Garcia

I haven't seen many of Pedro Almodovar's movies but they've all been reasonably good at flummoxing me, so full disclosure on that point, which is arguably in its favor. I'm not sure whether the effect is something about his work or the circumstances under which I've seen it. Certainly the day I saw Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, when it was new, was a notably bad one for me, though it had little to do with the movie. But the movie didn't help. The more recent The Skin I Live In also left me cold—too much arch concept and, as a creepshow, with the effect of an insect buzzing around one's ears after dark. Getting the insect to desist as often as not leads to boxing one's own ears, so in many ways the result is an awkward sitting tight and hoping it goes away soon, not exactly what I'm looking for in a movie.

I can see there's a lot to like about Talk to Her, even if it does surprise me a little to find it so highly regarded, occupying the critical consensus top 10 of the best movies of the 21st century (according to the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). The music by Alberto Iglesias is beautiful, almost distractingly so in some points. The images are nearly as alluring; Almodovar's colors may not be as saturated as on earlier pictures, but they are rich and full, accompanied by a sure hand with the staging and fluid camera. And the narrative is a kind of model of clarity, moving transparently from plot point to plot point. These formal qualities operate almost invisibly to propel the very strange story about the love of two men for women in comas—specific women who have suffered profound injuries, I should add, as opposed to some more generalized fetish—and the subsequent friendship engendered between them, a friendship marked as much by loss of identity as by love.

Ramones, "I Wanna Be Sedated" (1978)

(listen)

Any of dozens of Ramones songs heard most recently could constitute my one favorite and that's the truth. So let's just call this heard most recently, even as I go ahead and say it is my favorite Ramones song. From their fourth album, Road to Ruin, it has several of my favorite Ramones features: it's about grim mental illness in a light-hearted way (cf., "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "Teenage Lobotomy"), it's pro-drug in an anti-drug way (or maybe make that vice versa, viz., "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," "Carbona Not Glue," and in general all mentions of glue, plus also "We're a Happy Family," which rhymes Queens, refried beans, magazines, and thorazines), and, more broadly, it rocks up the place in an unmistakable way—"1-2-3-4 clunk-LOUD," etc. Is there anyone anywhere who still denies that this groove is, as intended, a lot of F-U-N? No doubt. I recently heard that some now consider the Stooges and the Ramones as polar era choices, two sides of a coin but you have to pick one (you know, the way people pit the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Donovan, or the Sex Pistols and the Clash). That's one to think about! I still think "I Wanna Be Sedated" is about what top 40 radio should have sounded like, at least partly, from approximately 1976 to 1984: blasts of squalling attack out of which emerge lovely Brill Building verse-chorus-verse gestures, all lurching forward in a cosmic upside-down cake of Archie comics and teenage werewolf movies. The stovepipe jean legs, black leather, and hair in the eyes, that's just style. The most salient line here goes like this, approximately: "Bamp bamp, buh bamp, buh bamp bamp, buh bamp, I wanna be sedated." Sing with. You can do it.

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

#19: Drugstore Cowboy (Gus Van Sant, 1989)

Gus Van Sant has made a number of pictures worth seeing—certainly To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester, and Elephant, which Phil already mentioned—along with a bunch of clunkers and interesting failures (the shot-for-shot remake of Psycho is among the most bizarre projects by anyone in the past 20 years). But Drugstore Cowboy remains my favorite and nothing else by him has ever come close. Maybe it's something about 1989—Spike Lee also released the only movie by him that I love without qualification that year, Do the Right Thing. Steven Soderbergh and Sex, Lies, and Videotape looked like another parallel until Soderbergh started getting his ship righted in the late '90s.

Drugstore Cowboy has a little something to offer everyone—nostalgia for the post-'60s hangover, a satisfying dramatic story, a nicely ambiguous ending, great language woven all through, and some fun caper turns—but what I like about it best is how it manages to be anti-drug without getting preachy and at the same time perfectly straightforward and convincing about the appeal of the life in the first place. For all the pathetic low-life qualities evinced in the clip at the link, everything you need to know about why anyone would get involved in a life of drugs is nicely detailed there.

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1993)

I'm really not sure which I like more in Scott McCloud's odd little kickoff to his eventual odd little trilogy (and counting?) of comics meditations: the ideas he lays out so clearly, or what a pleasure the thing is to read. His art style is clean, cartoony, and brims with the energy of his own ideas. Page by page, it's just so much fun to read. And all these years later it's apparent that some of his ideas are slowly but surely becoming the common currency. Example: "what happens between the panels," a concept I last heard directly referenced in the 2010 movie Super (which was pretty good!). Or, "This is not a pipe," which I know started nearly a century ago with Rene Magritte, but still, McCloud really applies the fine point to it. As with most formal arguments for the legitimacy of anything—in this case "comics," a word McCloud explicitly claims for his cause here, with a definition that excludes both Warner Brothers and "New Yorker" cartoons but includes Superman, Little Nemo, and some cave paintings—there's frequently a whiff of the self-consciously defensive about it. For the most part, McCloud skirts around any air of the fanboy, by keeping superheroes in good perspective and by maintaining the generally impressive appearance of someone who really seems to know what he's talking about. So superheroes are here, but so is Tintin, and so are Japanese manga and R. Crumb and all kinds of things. I think I find McCloud most interesting on Japanese comics, because he so obviously knows and appreciates them so much. One problem—and it's all mine, none of it McCloud's—is that as much as I love this I'm not any more inspired than I was before to go plunge into what's out there. Maybe even less so, because I think I know what awaits me. My own taste in comics, I have learned, is not nearly as catholic as McCloud's, nor as passionate. No point, for example, going out and buying a stack of manga. I did that last time (Mai, the Psychic Girl). And found it dull, found myself laboring to read it. In the world of graphic novels that's what I fear more than anything, because there are so many of them now. Yes, I still find things to love. It's just that the ratio of what there is to what's worth it is not so good and seems to be dropping. Again, this is my problem, not McCloud's. McCloud has given us an amazing book here. As far as I'm concerned, he is even better than Will Eisner at this kind of cracker-barrel comic book philosophizing, simply because he tells the stories better. It may be heresy to say this is a greater piece of work than Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art, but there I just said it. I think McCloud truly pried open the jaws of the medium's possibilities here. This one is also better than his own follow-ups too, but there's plenty of room for greatness in this series, as we will see.

In case it's not at the library.

Squeezing Out Sparks (1979)

I don't have much sense of how this is regarded nowadays, except in my own mind, where I generally find it vaguely denigrated as overrated and/or simple critics' favorite. This is unfortunate because it is actually much better than that, although it is also somehow timebound too in a sense, fastened down there in the past of the late '70s/turn of the '80s, constantly receding. Graham Parker turned out to be remarkably easy to put away. I don't think he wrote anything even close to his early stuff from this point on. It makes me a little sad, remembering my own various obsessive periods with him, and I wonder if that isn't what draws me back to it now, nostalgia. On the level of its weirdness—the wild swings at Japanese culture and UFOs and bad relationships (with and without abortion intimacies), a surprising lyricism alternating with retreats to winning yobby throwaways, e.g., "Saturday Nite [sic] Is Dead"—Squeezing Out Sparks is still remarkably fresh. No horns on this outing, just a rock band—Brinsley Schwarz, Martin Belmont, Bob Andrews, Steve Goulding, Andrew Bodnar—hitting all their marks with precision. And going through the album again recently keeps peeling off surprises: the raw surge of "Discovering Japan," the shocking tenderness of "You Can't Be Too Strong," the plaintive declaration of "Passion Is No Ordinary Word," the poise of the big finish, "Don't Get Excited," and on and on it goes, the hits keep coming, rocking out at will with style, economy, and power. It's a remarkable set. It did win the "Village Voice" Pazz & Jop poll of its year (running away, as I recall) and even made the Billboard album top 40 (barely), and for several months was unavoidable, playing at every house party and get-together and loud. Squeezing Out Sparks is indeed, as I discover every time I get myself to return to it, a hard and brilliant thing, lean and angry and constantly insinuating. In many ways it represents a consolidation, a pulling-together (one last time, in retrospect) of the coequal powers of Graham Parker and the Rumour, in tandem, everything promised on those first three albums herewith delivered on, no denying and sign here. Play loud, as they say. Don't forget.