The Tree of Life

What I loved about The Tree of Life was the headlong rush of images at times. Terrence Malick & Emmnauel Lubezki's probing camera, looking deep into, around, and through space and time to find a way to make sense and meaning of everything (in a sense, literally).

The discussion around the movie tends to center on its theology, or perhaps, teleology. If  you haven't seen it, the movie features a 20 minute passage near the beginning that starts with the big bang and shows the process of formation of the cosmos, the planet earth, and the beginnings of life from amoeba to aquatic creatures crawling out of the sea to dinosaurs and on to humankind. The argument is whether the guiding force in evolution/nature is grace or random chance/chaos. This is certainly a valid argument, but I think Malick is less interested in this argument, than showing you that whatever the animating force, he wants you to see that life is indeed progressing in a forwardly direction; rushing forward, in fact, which circles us back around to what I loved about the movie: the images. The images of the mother at play with her children in and around the house in Waco. The images of a domineering father struggling to hold his family together. The cold reflective surfaces of the skyscrapers of Downtown Dallas. The waystation at the end of life on a beach where loved ones who've passed away can be reunited. Sartre said "Hell is other people." This film says so is heaven.

The scope here is certainly ambitious. The movie tells the story of existence in the universe through the frame of one person/family. Your one life has Meaning in the grand sweep of EVERYTHING because you were here at all, and if you hadn't been here life, quite simply (simply!) would have been infinitely, and infinitismally, different.

Young Adult

Most people never move away. Statistics show that there is less geographic mobility (that is, people moving from one place to another) in each decade since they started tracking such statistics in the late 1940s. In 2004, only 18% of people moved, and of those 58% moved within the same county; only about 1 in 50 moved to a different state or country. The numbers are even lower as you go down the income ladder.

Everybody stays somewhere.

For most of the residents of Mercury, Minnesota they stayed in their hometown, took a job their mom or dad probably had before they retired, got married, sent their kids to the same schools they went to, and now watch soccer games from the sidelines of fields they once played on. Mavis Gary moved away, went to the big (relatively speaking) city, became a famous (relatively speaking) author. She was the one that got out. At least geographically. Emotionally, she was stuck at Mercury High (home of the Injuns! [ever interested in details, writer/director team Diablo Cody/Jason Reitman include the point that the mascot had been changed to  Indians in the name of cultural sensitivity to local peoples.).
She is forever 18. Even the once-popular series of YA books she ghost-writes are high school dramas. The movie opens as she struggles to write the last book in the series. How does she write what happens at the end of high school if she never got there herself? How does she show her character has grown up after all this time, is moving on, putting away childish things when she still walks around in Hello Kitty t-shirts?

The idea of being stuck in a rut vis a vis personal development has been a topic of much discussion in our culture, what with the rise to prominence of the Judd Apatow man-child movies. Here’s a movie that reminds us that woman-child is just as possible and problematic, only Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody have the conviction of not letting her off the hook with a hunky, responsible white knight who redeems her. Her only meaningful connection in the movie is Matt, a character who, by being not dissimilarly stunted in the area of personal growth, offers her self-reflection. She claims to be in Mercury for Buddy, but she doesn’t have any interest in Buddy. What (not insignificantly, mind you, I wrote what, not who) she wants is "Buddy", the 18 year old big man on campus, the one that inspired the love interest in her books. When she tells him he might recognize the character based on his 18 year old self, you wonder if he would, and if he did if he would do so with the same approbation Mavis does.

There are conflicting impulses for people who leave home, especially when home is a small town: They want to get away and measure themselves against the world, but they also don’t want to feel like they are missing out on what’s going on back home. They want to come home and be a hero, an object of admiration. To come back and find out no one thinks about you much, they aren’t following your every move with baited breath can be humbling. What are they doing that’s so great, that I’m not THE topic of conversation?

In the end, Mavis has no great revelation or growth or change. In the first act we see her on a date with someone she met online; she's bored, barely listening (if at all) to what he says, but wakes up with his pasty arm draped over her just the same. At the end of the movie, she drunkenly, desperately, decides(?) to sleep with Matt. She wakes up with his pasty arm draped over her and maybe for the first time realizes that her station in life might be self-inflicted. This is the scariest thing. It's bad enough when things aren't going your way, worse still when it's your own fault.

Attack the Block

This is the alien-invasion movie people should've been watching this summer instead of Super 8 or Cowboys and Aliens. For my money, this was maybe the most pure fun movie of the year. A gang of up-to-no-good teenage punks in London are in the middle of a mugging when an alien falls from the sky. It attacks one of them and runs away. They chase it down, wound it and carry it off as a prize to their sci-fi loving friend to see if he knows what it is. Soon they see what appear to be dozens of meteors falling from the sky, they figure its more aliens and since they'd dispatched the first one with such ease, figure its time to go alien-bashing (wielding bats mostly, and, in one instance, a sword) they don't take kindly to anyone/anything invading their neighborhood, regardless of species/planet of origin), but things don't go as expected when they turn out to be a pack of pitch black creatures with glow-in-the-dark fangs (see above) which are a good deal more fierce than their initial conquest, and soon they are being hunted, hounded, really. Alien invasion, in the modern cinema, generally involves grand governmental plans to thwart attacks, surging, panicked crowds, momunets being destroyed, breathless TV reports, etc. Attack the Block envisions alien invasion on a much smaller scale. Much like the movie Monsters last year, it is a film where the limited budget requires the scope to be smaller, but the imagination to flourish. Also, those monsters are pretty awesome.

Literary Interlude: Hardboiled Edition

      A door squeaked behind me. I whirled, but I needn't have bothered. A hard voice, about as English as Amos and Andy, said: "Put 'em up, bud."
     The butler, the very English butler, stood there in the doorway, a gun in his hand, tight-lipped. The girl turned her wrist and shot him just kind of casually, in the shoulder or something. He squealed like a stuck pig.
"Go away, you're intruding.", she said coldly.
He ran. We heard his steps running.
"He's going to fall", she said.
    I was wearing my Luger in my right hand now, a little late in the season as usual. I came around with it. Old man Jeeter was holding on to the table, his face gray as a paving block. His knees were giving. George stood cynically, holding a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist, watching him.
"Let him fall," I said. "Down is where he belongs."

• Raymond Chandler, "Trouble is my Business" (1939)

United States of Space

I love conspiracy theories!

Two former participants in the CIA’s Mars visitation program of the early 1980’s have confirmed that U.S. President Barack H. Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and was among the young Americans from the program who they later encountered on the Martian surface after reaching Mars via “jump room.”



Andrew D. Basiago , 50, a lawyer in Washington State who served in DARPA’s time travel program Project Pegasus in the 1970’s, and fellow chrononaut William B. Stillings, 44, who was tapped by the Mars program for his technical genius, have publicly confirmed that Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and that each later encountered Obama during visits to rudimentary U.S. facilities on Mars that took place from 1981 to 1983.

http://m.examiner.com/exSeattle/pm_76001/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=UniWuhAE

Head-Body-Head-Body, or: Learn How to Fight, Ya Bum!

So I'm driving down the street, on my way back to the station after lunch. At the corner of Ventura and G Street, a place where migrant day laborers frequently hang around waiting for a truck to roll up looking for a couple guys for the day. I stop at a red light behind another car. Two guys on bicycles roll past up to the intersection. Out of nowhere, a random assailant rushes one of the cyclists and throws a haymaker right into his midsection knocking him from his bike. Then another swift blow to the head. The man cowered and tried to run. The attacker has fire in his eyes and looked ready to kill him. He was shouting in what I assume was Spanish and advancing on the two cyclists. They tried to talk him down but he had his fists clenched, his nostrils flared, and he was itchin to open up a can on those two guys. I was just hoping they got out of the road before the light turned green. They did, the bikes didn't. So I had to maneuver between the fight and the bikes to go on my merry way.

I didn't look back to see how it resolved. I just assume they solved whatever it was amicably, and all is now well. Probably a case of mistaken identity.
If the ruffian did go through with it and kill them I didn't want to be a witness to a murder, for two reasons
1) Eww, gross.
2) Such a hassle. I don't have time for that. Well, technically, I probably do have time, but still...inconvenience.


Anyhow, this little affair brought me back to the halcyon days of internet video, when people would look up, post, stage, and pay for footage of "bum fights". (That was one adolescent itch I managed to leave unscratched, though, my contemporaries more than compensated for my disinterest)
There's something strange, but almost instinctive in people to love to watch people fight. I think it's lazy to cast it as simply a love of violence or even desensitization. Recent events in Tuscon show that people don't love violence, at least not uncritically. No one turns on the local news or reads in the paper about stabbings and shootings in their neighborhoods and cities and is amused/entertained. So it's not simple bloodlust. But there is something. Whether indigent immigrants or professional pugilists, people the world over love a good fight.
Even when it's staged.


Which brings me, as most things do eventually, to the cinema, and particularly in this case, David O. Russell's The Fighter.

The fascinating thing to me about this movie is that the eponymous 'fighter' is the least aggressive character in the story. Everyone else is a tiger on the prowl, protecting turf and attacking with abandon; Mickey (as played by Mark Wahlberg) is, oh I don't know (note to self: no more animal metaphors) a wise old owl, or perhaps, a soaring eagle, surveying everything, picking his spots, but mostly hanging back. Much of the commentary around the film mentions him as a "passive" character, lacking the charisma of Dickie (played to great effect by Christian Bale). 2 things about this:
1) It's perfectly written in terms of family dynamics. The flashy older brother, full of promise and braggadocio contrasts with the mild mannered younger son, who developed this persona to cope with being in the wide shadow of his sibling, despite surpassing talent.
2) His passivity (if we agree to call it that) works as a serviceable means to an end. It's not as though he doesn't do/accomplish anything, he just does it so deftly you don't notice what he's doing til it's done. In the ring you can be more of a brusier (see Butterbean) or you can be a tactician (see Lennox Lewis). In a fight, Mickey is more of the former, but in life he is clearly the latter, able to outflank his entire family/entourage to create conditions for peacable reconciliation.
I thought the fight scenes in the movie were competent, if unremarkable, and as such, I thought the best place to end the picture would've been the shot of the whole clan walking toward the ring: Mickey (in the center) with Dickie, Mom, Charlene, George. There's nothing wrong with the last fight, and it certainly helps the commerciality of the thing, but in my view the 'fight' of the movie was resolved when he had everyone in tow.
Passive? Ha. A knockout, indeed.

Who Is This "Oscar", Anyway?

If I had an award show/ceremony and/or statuettes to hand out for movies from the last year I would nominate the following and grant them thusly (winner in bold-face):




Best Picture:
Black Swan
The Kids Are All Right
Let Me In
Mother and Child
Please Give
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone




Best Director:
Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right
Joel & Ethan Coen - True Grit
Claire Denis, White Material
David Fincher, The Social Network
Rodrigo Garcia, Mother and Child
Nicole Holofcener, Please Give
Edgar Wright, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World





Best Lead Actor:
George Clooney, The American
Leonardo DiCaprio, Shutter Island
Jesse Eisenberg, The Social Network
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, 127 Hours
Ewan MacGregor, The Ghost Writer
Edgar Ramirez, Carlos





Best Lead Actress:
Annette Bening, Mother and Child
Isabelle Huppert, White Material
Catherine Keener, Please Give
Hye Ja-Kim, Mother
Joey King, Ramona and Beezus
Jennifer Lawrence, Winter's Bone
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World





Best Supporting Actor:
Christian Bale, The Fighter
Pierce Brosnan, The Ghost Writer
Vincent Cassel, Black Swan
John Hawkes, Winter's Bone
Samuel L. Jackson, Mother and Child
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech





Best Supporting Actress:
Cecile de France, Hereafter
Greta Gerwig, Greenberg
Chloe Grace-Moretz, Let Me In
Rebecca Hall, Please Give
Mila Kunis, Black Swan
Melissa Leo, The Fighter
Naomi Watts, Mother and Child
Kerry Washington, Mother and Child





Best Screenplay:
Black Swan
Let Me In
Monsters
Mother and Child
Please Give
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
White Material





Best Animated Picture:
Despicable Me
How To Train Your Dragon
Tangled
Toy Story 3





Best Cinematography:
The American
Let Me In
Mother and Child
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Social Network
True Grit
White Material





Best Editing:
The Ghost Writer
The Kids Are All Right
Mother
Scott Pilgrim vs The World
The Social Network
True Grit
White Material
Winter's Bone





Best Visual Effects:
Black Swan
Inception
Monsters
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
Tron Legacy





Best Score
Black Swan
Inception
Night Catches Us
Shutter Island
Tron Legacy
True Grit





Best Debut Feature
Lena Dunham, Tiny Furniture
Gareth Edwards, Monsters
Tanya Hamilton, Night Catches Us





Best Documentary
Catfish
Exit Through The Gift Shop





Best Foreign Language Film
Carlos
Mother
White Material


End Note #1: Obviously (hopefully it's obvious) this is based solely on what I saw, which was about 50-55 of the year's movies.
End Note #2: Most of the movie titles are from the back half of the alphabet, most of the actors/directors names are from the front half of the alphabet. Cosmic symmetry.

2010 Top 10s: Albums

These rankings are intended to reflect only my favorites, given what I actually listened to, and I lay no claim to being able to proclaim these, or any album, the "best" of the year.

Please note: the excerpted reviews are not written by me, while I may be inclined to write effusively about each of these record so many have already done so that it would be redundant. So I'm just editing for space, with links to the full reviews are in the album title.

Also: a previous post for favorite songs of the year can be found by scrolling down, or if you're too lazy to scroll, just click here.

And now, the list:

1. Carolina Chocolate Drops - Genuine Negro Jig

For the most part this album’s an unashamedly foot-stomping countrified fiddle-and-banjo racket, and with it the trio reclaim what is usually assumed to be exclusively hillbilly property. But this historic black style is mountain music with something more, as these 12 tracks show how it fits between the European quadrilles and the Anglo/Celtic folk that came across the Atlantic and the rural blues and ragtime jazz that grew out the American South, informing so much contemporary music. And in the hands of the Carolina Chocolate Drops this history lesson is far from dry.

The relatively youthful threesome learned their craft from original Piedmont players and swap instruments – banjo, fiddle, jug, harmonica, guitar, snare drum and kazoo – with ease, and although they all sing, the guys, Dom Flemons and Justin Robinson, leave most of the vocals to the opera-trained Rhiannon Giddens. Cleverly, the group mix traditional songs with original compositions and a couple of surprising covers, allowing them to honour the past, then subtly nudge it forward linking it to the modern music they grew up with.

2. The Green Children - Encounter

From the opening notes of the title song, Encounter, you know you’re in for an album full of lush arrangements that owes as much to nature as to electronics.  Or as the press notes call it “ethereal pop with post-modern dance beats.”  Basically, the kind of music you’d expect to hear at a hip coffee house, a chill after hours lounge or that restaurant where it’s impossible to get a reservation.

But there’s more to The Green Children than simply their music.  There’s also an important movement.  Milla and Marlow also cofounded The Green Children Foundation to help raise awareness and funds for the Grameen Bank and Grameen Healthcare Services in Bangladesh. And when the band released a CD/DVD in Norway in 2006, through sales and donations, they raised about $500k, which helped open the Grameen Green Children Eye Hospital.  And 100% of the money donated to the Foundation goes directly to the cause. 

3. Local Natives - Gorilla Manor

For the L.A indie rock quintet Local Natives, it all comes down to voices. Sometimes they're up front, gliding over a haunting little Saharan-blues guitar lick; often they flit about in the margins, lighting up a song like a pulled curtain...The tipsy saloon piano that buoys lead single "Airplanes" and the coy, restrained fuzz of "Camera Talk" prove the Natives can wring evocative sounds from traditional instruments. Drummer Matt Frazier has an ambitious knack for accenting a song with bursts of clatter...but the band always comes back to the spectacle and possibilities of those vocals. There's a bit of Broadway, a touch of Motown and a tang of choir nerd to them, but Local Natives avoid the preciousness of Grizzly Bear or the gang-chorus rapture of Arcade Fire. It's a rare band that can use its chemistry as its own instrument.

4. LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening

Serving up a comprehensively postmodern survey of pop culture with wit, panache and an enviable dose of hooks, This Is Happening manages to avoid predictability by consistently keeping one step ahead of the listener yet sidestepping clever-clever irony with a genuine warmth that’s naturally layered within the giggling heathen at the heart of the record...What Murphy does best is balance these tendencies so that none of his whim-chasing expulsions ever feel crass or smug, and by finding the spirited inspiration in the nondescript, the self-effacement in our projected criticisms, and the fun in the commonplace, he’s able to keep us entertained in the process....by finding a way to be life-affirming while keeping our hips shaking, without casting off life’s woes and joys as either paltry or boring, LCD Soundsystem has succeeded at capturing both our minds and our bodies without sacrificing its head-nodding spirit or its heavy-hearted sense of purpose along the way.

5. Janelle Monae - The ArchAndroid

The songs zip gleefully from genre to genre, mostly grounded in R&B and funk, but spinning out into rap, pastoral British folk, psychedelic rock, disco, cabaret, cinematic scores, and whatever else strikes her fancy. It's about as bold as mainstream music gets, marrying the world-building possibilities of the concept album to the big tent genre-mutating pop of Michael Jackson and Prince in their prime. The first listen is mostly about being wowed by the very existence of this fabulously talented young singer and her over-the-top record; every subsequent spin reveals the depths of her achievement.

6. Eric Bibb - Booker's Guitar

[Eric] Bibb is a creative songwriter, an excellent singer and a masterful guitar player, and that's all on display here. The songs are understated little gems filled with the passion of honest expression. They're what I would call "soft blues" -- music inspired by and drawn from the tradition, but not necessarily in the traditional blues musical format. The tracks are all original, and all-acoustic, with Grant Dermody adding subtly powerful harp accompaniment...this is a gently swinging and thoughtful bluesy album for a cold winter night and a double shot of Jim Beam Black.

7. Justin Townes Earle - Harlem River Blues

On this project, Earle is less concerned with lyrics than with finding his sound, and he finds it in a fat-toned, unhurried country-blues. That greasy groove allows his handsome tenor to relax until he sounds as if he's talking off-handedly and confidentially, even as he hits every note with dead-on pitch and a resonant hum.
The 10 original songs are mostly juke-joint numbers, finger-snapping tunes about fickle women and footloose men. Some of the best musicians in Nashville lay down an understated but irresistible throb beneath such songs as "Move Over Mama" and the title track. But it is Earle's voice, shrugging off a thousand bumps and bruises to look forward to the next scene, that sells them.

8. The Soft Pack - The Soft Pack

Within the band’s stripped-down rock, there are hints of ‘50s surf and ‘60s garage rock, echoes of ‘70s punk and new wave à la the Modern Lovers, traces of ‘80s college rock, and more. Yet the Soft Pack’s music doesn’t feel overtly retro -- they’re just not trying hard to sound “modern.” Unlike some of their predecessors, their simplicity is more direct than arty, a bash-it-out and get-it-out-there approach...They’ve got the template of classic sounds down and failsafe pop instincts...compared to the increasingly delicate, intricate indie of the late 2000s, The Soft Pack sounds vital.

9. Francis and The Lights - It'll Be Better

Francis Farewell Starlite is a smart 28-year-old songwriter in love with Eighties R&B at its slickest, whitest and oddest — he sings a little like Peter Gabriel and mixes cutting jazz-piano chords and clever pop constructions like Steely Dan. That sensibility has earned him production work with Drake, and on his full-length debut, Starlite turns his faith in catchy tunes into a series of studies on the persuasive power of pop itself.

10. Fitz & The Tantrums - Pickin' Up the Pieces

Even if Fitz & company were to fall through a wormhole while performing and land in 1967, they wouldn’t be greeted as great innovators. Their sound is traditional genre to the point of being unabashedly cliché more often than not...yet the tracks that stretch the clichés the thinnest justify doing so by being the catchiest damn sweets on the album...To answer the question inherently presented by anything retro, this band’s debut represents a true revival, rather than an exhumation; Without heart, you’re just a zombie, and Fitz & The Tantrums are not lacking anything in that category. In fact, many of the compositions on Pickin’ Up The Pieces are so perfect and full of conviction that it’s hard not to call them classics without exaggeration...and to say that the flawless, heartstring-plucking album-closer Tighter gives Elton John a run for his money might not even be saying too much.

11. Aqualung - Magnetic North

Aqualung moves from track to track on Magnetic North wearing a variety of different personas. He can change from Beck to Coldplay to Radiohead all within a few bars. And quite often when artists breach that kind of mimicry it comes off as such, but he manages to maintain his identity while taking the form of (what I can only assume are) his greatest personal influences.
And the writing is equally enchanting. The beauty of his writing is found in its simplicity. He says exactly what he is saying…This record has a lot of integrity, and is extremely accessible. I’d recommend this to anyone who just loves music.

12. Seth Swirksy - Watercolor Day

Rejoice, pop fans: the first truly great record of 2010 has arrived, in the form of Seth Swirsky’s gorgeous “Watercolor Day.” The 19-track collection of sweet, summery sounds is equal parts Beach Boys (circa ’66/’67), Emitt Rhodes, Harry Nilsson and every great sunshine pop act from the late ’60s.
Swirsky has fashioned a marvelous mixture of beautifully understated lead and background vocals, perfectly placed horns and strings, and a host of intoxicating melodies that swing and sway. 

And the rest of the top 20, loosely ranked
13. Darius Rucker - Charleston, SC 1966
14. Sara Bareilles - Kaleidoscope Heart
15. Jaheim - Another Round
16. Lana Mir - Lana Mir
17. JJ Grey & Mofro - Georgia Warhorse
18. PJ Morton - Walk Alone
19. Sugarland - The Incredible Machine
20. Sugar & Gold - Get Wet!