Forgive Durden – Razia’s Shadow: A Musical Review

January 25, 2009 at 2:46 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Forgive Durden - Razia's Shadow

Note: Max here. Not sure how I let this get so long. Please read it anyway. It’ll crack you up. I think it’ll be more enjoyable if you are listening while you read it, so try to make that happen.

I never got around to making a top albums of 2008 list. I think it has quite a large sum to do with personal laziness, but I’m going to take the time to write a couple short reviews for some albums from last year that I think deserve mentioning.

Let’s start with Razia’s Shadow: A Musical, by Forgive Durden, which is easily the dorkiest record I heard last year, and unabashedly so. It’s an album inspired by immense theatre geekery, but also a good heap of fantasy. Razia’s Shadow is a concept album to the extreme. It’s essentially the soundtrack to a musical too elaborate and dorky for anyone to ever put on, and it’s awesome. It’s by a band called Forgive Durden, whose previous work I’m completely unfamiliar with. I heard of the project because of the many guest vocalists on the album, a myriad of emo/pop-punk stars, all of whom play a certain character in the story. Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou (whose upcoming album is eagerly anticipated by this critic) narrates with a brilliant, croaky charisma.

The plot is difficult to decipher without a little effort– Thomas Dutton, who wrote the thing and plays the main character in both halves of the story, spared us the exposition– but wikipedians came to my rescue, and a quick read of that page made the listening experience much better, once I figured out what was going on. Most of this review is plot summary, because I think it’s kind of needed in order to parse this album and appreciate its awesomeness or its silliness.

Like I mentioned, there are two halves of the story. In the first, a God-like character named O The Scientist (Casey Crescenzo of The Dear Hunter), creates the world. An angel named Ahrima (Thomas Dutton) feels like he’s not given enough credit for his skillz (which are never really made clear) and gets pissed off. Then, a spider called Barayas (Max Bemis of Say Anything, altogether cool raspy-voiced guy who pulled a similar emo-guest-party on his album In Defense of the Genre) lands on his shoulder, and I guess he’s some kind of would-be terrorist, because he convinces Ahrima to “bring those lamps back to me, don’t leave them in one piece” to gain everyone’s respect. The thing is, destroying “those lamps” for some reason pretty much destroys the world. It doesn’t make sense to me either, but it works, and this is one of the best songs on the album.

Despite the world being burned down, everyone’s okay. They just move somewhere else. I don’t know, whatever. But Ahrima must be punished, so Toba The Tura (Chris Conley of Saves The Day) arrives to fuck him up. Conley rocks the song, starting out as a sort of understanding, sweet-voiced guy, and building to a frenzied condemnation. Everyone moves to a new, “light” world, separated from his “dark” one by a mountainous wall of stone.

And then the plot skips ahead a century. Now the world is split in two, and this is symptomatic of the lack of love in the world or something. It’s silly. It’s fun. Let’s go with it.

The two songs that mark the jump are The Oracle, in which it’s prophecized that someday there will be two people whose “true love will be strong enough to erase the wrong we’ve done, the dark and light will become one” and “A Hundred-Year, Minute-Long Intermission” whose title I kind of adore. Both feature Danny Stevens of The Audition, who I’ve never heard but have me sold on the strength of their singer.

When the plot picks up, both the light and dark sides of the world have developed their own societies of people. The new main character is Adakias, again played by Thomas Dutton, who grew up on the dark side, which is later described as “forever shaded, where the jaded are never wrong.” He wants to be the one to fulfill the prophecy and restore the world via his ability to love. Other people who live on the dark side laugh at him, because obviously they’re dicks, they live on the dark side. When his brother Pallis (Brendon Urie of Panic At The Disco, who I submit to be underrated) learns of his plan to leave and search for love, he sings, “You are so foolish. The Dark has been your home. If you elope, I’ll hunt you down, through suffering you’ll atone.” Fucking yikes.

So he leaves for the Light side to search for love, and in the next song he finds it in Princess Anhura (Greta Salpeter of The Hush Sound). This song, “It’s True Love” is so silly and schmaltzy. She sings, presumably not long after meeting him, “I never would guess your touch could fill me with such thoughts to marry you, have your babies, too.” I love it. The duet builds to a powerful and, somehow, believable height. Salpeter here deserves loads of commendation for being committed to singing these lines with the conviction she does, especially when she needs to sing the name “Adakias” with affection.

The couple meet with Anhura’s father, the king (Nic Newsham of Gatsby’s American Dream, who I saw open for Bear Vs. Shark years ago), who is suspicious of Adakias and seems to suspect that he’s from the dark side (oh yeah, he’s hiding that fact). The king opens with one of my favorite lines, the absurd, “So you’re the boy I’ve heard so much about from my daughter’s open mouth.” He doesn’t approve. Adakias probably doesn’t help things when he sings, “I just want your daughter’s heart, you fool.” Dutton and Salpeter’s voices are really wonderful together here again, when his simple plea of “I love your daughter and she, well, she loves me back” builds to “All we have is love, my King, so let’s sing ‘la-da-da-da!’ You probably have to hear it to believe it, but it’s a magical moment.

Without his approval, they decide to elope in secret. However, Anhura begins to fall sick. Adakias knows this is because he’s from the dark side. Uh oh. His love is gonna get her dead! We learn this from the narrator, and the next song is poorly sequenced, as it takes a detour from the revelation we just learned, but it’s a visit to the Bawaba Brothers (John Gourley of Portugal. The Man, lending his new found Alaskan soul vocals and Kris Anaya of An Angle, AKA the most transparent rip off I’ve ever heard; he sounds just like Conor Oberst). I’m not really sure who the Bawaba Brothers are, but they tell Adakias that he’s a descendent of the guy that separated the world, and that story is more than mythical lore, which gives him confidence that he’s destined to fulfill the prophecy and restore the world. This song is one of my favorite musically, it’s just gorgeous, but probably should have happened a couple tracks sooner.

Back to our dying princess. They go see the doctor (Shawn Harris, The Matches, who are a kickass band), who is probably my favorite character here. Harris is just absurd here, he has so much fun. His Dr. Dumaya is absolutely insane. He starts out laughing maniacally and then starts coughing… maniacally, obviously. He informs them “Now what you got ain’t no quick fix, it ain’t no common cold. What you need’s a bona fide doctor’s miracle.”

What follows is so ridiculously dumb and ridiculous that I don’t know what to do besides laugh and love it. He tells her he’ll heal her on the condition that she stay with him forever. “I promise to take care of her, well rather, she’ll take care of me for the rest of her life in the Dark, fulfilling Doctor’s fantasies.” I can imagine that, but not what follows. Anhura resists, but Adakias makes her! He says “it’s the only way.” So she consents. Jesus.

So the doctor heals her…. and just then, Pallis bursts in! In the likely case that you forgot who that is, it’s Adakias’s brother who promised to hunt him down if he eloped.

This is the final song, and it is fairly epic. There is some kind of hilarious but well-written wordplay in this encounter. I just gotta quote it.

Adakias: Casanovas have charmed with chiffons, so chichi. Chased her with conceited coteries.
Anhura: Maharajahs have magniloquently mouthed their love for me through their menageries.
Adakias: She’s been propositioned, propounded by every pompous prince. Given panniers of peerless pears and plums, polished.
Anhura: I’ve been seduced with shimmering, sparkling stones. Squired by suitors to sizable chateaus.
Adakias: And I’m the one she chose.

These tongue twisters are belted out confidently to a jazzy bounce. Pallis, however, sees fit to reveal that Adakias has been lying about being from the Dark, and he’s the reason she’s dying. Of course it comes out like this. It’s kind of a tired plot contrivance, but we’ll let it go for now, because right after Pallis reveals this, he sings, “But I suppose it’s in vain, since her life is ending, when I thrust this blade into her heart-a-thumping.” Ahh!! And then comes the most gloriously, theatrically emo moment on the album, as Adakias sing-screams, “Brother no!!!” and, as we soon realize, dives in front of the blade.

This sacrifice demonstrates his true love, and the two parts of the world reunite in a showstopping, cheesy fucking display as we’re reminded that love and sacrifice conquer all. The narrator takes us out, and the curtains drop.

It’s hard to say what we just experienced. What’s great is that the melodramatic theatrics of the emo genre match perfectly with, well, melodramatic theatre. It’s a surprisingly perfect fit.

-Max Jacobson

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Jews on Christmas; The Curious Case of Benjamin Button review

January 8, 2009 at 4:52 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

I’ve already had one heated argument over this movie, which seems to do that to people as only really long movies and really short ones can.  I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on Christmas, in a packed theater of Jews (or people who thought it would be fun to act like Jews), and I was stuck all the way to the side in the second row.  So my neck was craned awkwardly and most of my views of the characters were a bit skewed – and I STILL loved this movie.  I don’t think it’s good enough to crack my top three movies of the year, because those three (The Fall, The Dark Knight, WALL*E) are pretty impervious.  But still, it was an absolutely wrenching tale for me – a fully realized document of a life.  And that sounds kind of trite when I read it back, actually.  But dammit! It’s fucking true.

Benjamin Button, played subtly and stoically (too much so for any real shot at Mickey Rourke or Sean Penn’s Oscar) by Brad Pitt, ages backward, and grows up in an old folks home where he is left by his horrified father immediately after birth.  Though his body ages backwards, his mind is where his real age lies (a radical departure from the source material which at least one person I know thinks is awful).  His unique situation leads inexorably to an interesting life – people tend to be drawn to him at all stages of his life except for the radical edges, when they are repulsed.  When his body’s old but his mind is that of a preteen, people like my favorite character, Captain Mike, are charmed by his youthful enthusiasm despite his (apparent) advanced age.  Captain Mike helms a tugboat with a ragtag (of course) bunch of sailors that eventually sails to Russia, taking the mentally-teenaged Benjamin with them.

Okay, I just caught myself at really stupid plot summary.  Instead of continuing that, I’m going to give a list of people who affect Benjamin’s life in a meaningful way.

  • Queenie – Benjamin’s mother for all intensive purposes.  She raises him, gives him guidance rooted in a deep, deep faith and a seemingly endless well of kindness.  Although this kind of down-home, southern black TLC female character has gotten plenty clichéd by now, that doesn’t mean the role is just in the bank no matter what actress you pick.  Taraji P. Henson owns this role.
  • Ngunda Oti – Probably the most minor of these roles, but one of my favorites.  He’s the African pygmy who (based on a true story) lived in a zoo after being taken from his home in Africa.  He lived for a time in the old folks’ home with Benjamin, and taught him about self-confidence.  Rampai Mohadi was incredible here, he stole his scenes as a person who has that special light around him, the kind that makes any audience want to know him, and want him to have what he desires – to be home.
  • Thomas Button – Benjamin’s father who abandons him at birth, he’s the head of Button’s Buttons, a successful button company, and after running into (mentally) young Benjamin, decides to keep tabs on him and invite him out for the occasional drink.  The sheer emotional anguish of these encounters from Thomas’s side is fascinating, since he’s not really a monster – he just made a bad decision.  That doesn’t mean he’s a good person either (we never really can tell), but he has plenty of humanity.  Thomas does care about Benjamin, leaving his button factory to him at death, and (SPOILER) though Benjamin resents him after the reveal for abandonment and subsequent deceit, he can see what we see. (END SPOILER)
  • Captain Mike – Don’t we all wish we knew a Captain Mike? He’s radically free-spirited and independent, but with a killer sense of nobility.  When called upon at the outset of World War II, he knows what he (and members of his crew) must do. (SPOILER) Mike’s death slams home like a hammer, the hardest death of the movie, mostly because he was the only one that died before his time.  Up until this point, Benjamin’s only knowledge of death was the old folks who came through the home at which he grew up.  There, death was natural and expected.  But here, Benjamin learns that death can be surprising, and can be tragic.  Mike’s last words were my first almost-cry of the movie.  The hummingbird bit, though, seemed a bit much.(END SPOILER)
  • Elizabeth Abbott – I’m split about this one.  She’s the wife of a British spy in Russia, played with sort of a cold warmth that only British ladies like Tilda Swinton can master.  There are some lines in her sequence that are the most realist of the whole movie – natural, as opposed to literary, like the rest of the movie.  But there are some lines that are also stilted, shoehorned in to give context.  Really watchable, but not as profound as the rest.
  • Daisy – Where to begin.  As a child, she was okay – the well-known curious girl that a boy her age can’t help but like.  But once Cate Blanchette takes over, she is devastating.  Maybe my favorite narrative function of this movie was due to the framing of the piece as being told to Daisy from Benjamin’s journal on her deathbed while Hurricane Katrina was closing in on New Orleans by her daughter.  What this allows for is the completely realized perspective of both main characters.  Although some have criticized this part as director David Fincher and writer Eric Roth talking down to the audience, I really appreciate knowing character’s motivations instead of being forced to assume, sometimes without enough information and sometimes incorrectly.  Daisy’s narrative presence as the grounding force (that is, the perspective of someone aging forwards) is a crucial part of this story, and makes it feel as whole as it does.  And the fact that she gets so damaged, so affected by Benjamin’s condition might be my favorite part of the movie.

As you can tell, not a perfect movie, but an extremely good one, completely filled with huge, huge emotions.  Of course, there’s a lot more to this movie, like the painful, wrenching limits of time – but I can’t really say it in any more profound a way than AintitCool’s Moriarty did in his swan song review for the site.  This is really the best I can do.

And there’s also this old guy who talks about getting struck by lightning a bunch of times that provides some classic comic relief stuff.  This movie, until the real heart of the Daisy love sequence, isn’t tragic – it has some wry moments.  But these little lightning scenes took the audience by such surprise that a little soundless clip got huge, HUGE laughs.  And the last bit, even in the midst of some of the heaviest moments, made the audience laugh just as hard, but through their tears.

It seems we finally have our theme for comparing 2007 and 2008 as years in movies.  Although no one would begin to argue that 2008 rivals ’07 as far as the quality of their movies (I hope), what ’08 does provide that ’07 didn’t (except for in a couple of instances) were movies about big emotions, big feelings, as opposed to big concepts, big thoughts like in There Will Be Blood.  And as far as the magnum opus of each year, that movie really fits into my comparison when against, say, The Fall, which I’ll deal with in my year-end list, and against this movie.  I look forward to seeing this again when I don’t have to crane my neck.

Okay, I realize I did this character list twice in a row.  But they were far apart, the reviews both took a long, long time to finish each, so cut me a break.  Reviews of Milk and Let The Right One In will be my last before the year-end list.  After that, this blog will hit a crossroads that might need a full post in itself to discuss.

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Is that emotion I’m feeling or is it my stomach eating itself? Sunshine review

December 29, 2008 at 12:58 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

So I have a bunch of movies on my computer that I’ve recently…acquired…in HD. Not Blu-Ray level, exactly, but it looks like they were ripped from Blu-Rays and compressed just slightly. Every time I…acquire…them, they say 720p, and I’m inclined to believe that. Most of the movies I have like that are ones I’ve already seen, that I just wanted in high quality, because when you have an HD-capable screen such as that of the MacBook Pro, you want to test its capabilities. And these certainly pass that test.

However, there are a couple movies that I acquired that I hadn’t seen, and figured HD was the way to do it.  The first of these that I’ve seen is Sunshine, the last movie from director Danny Boyle before he made critical darling Slumdog Millionaire, which I’m still waiting to see.  Let me tell you – I do not ever want to see this movie in any lower quality now.  The visuals here are completely breathtaking.  Is this what HD movies really are all like? Because the other ones I have look incredible, but they don’t quite look like this one.  Maybe it’s the sci-fi aspect of it, whatever.  I’m getting a little preoccupied here.

And the fact that the visuals are incredible really informed my opinion of this movie more than visuals usually do, and they kind of keyed a mindset change for me.  I’m going to try to do that every time – not say “well, this movie has great visuals, but it sucks because the story’s stupid.” I think that’s a bad way to look at movies –  a movie can be bad despite great visuals, but the visuals still have to come into play – good visuals make a movie better, simply.

And I don’t think this movie is terribly smart, but I have a positive feeling about this movie because of the sheer wonder of the visuals.  The score gets a little too imposing at times, but for the most part it just serves the visuals perfectly, like at the beginning, when you’re getting the feel of the spaceship.  The string swells are so warm, I felt welcomed to this place – Danny Boyle’s trademark, everyone says, is highlighting the pure humanity of his characters.  Here you get that a lot.

But though the characters were incredibly fully realized, I thought they fell a little too much into tropes.  For this bullet point section, there are abundant SPOILERS.

  • Cillian Murphy as Capa: The main character, thoughtful, a little introspective, is blamed for a lot of things, a bit of a martyr complex, a bit reflective of all the neuroses of the rest of the crew.
  • Cliff Curtis as Searle: The guy who has an obsession with something weird that creeps out the rest of the crew, that is reflected in his demise.
  • Michelle Yeoh as Corazon: The female crew member who is all about good-naturedness (and nature); her name’s fucking Spanish for heart, for chrissakes.
  • Hiroyuki Sanada as Kaneda: The captain who is chill and under control, self-sacrificial.  He dies pretty soon, of course.
  • Rose Byrne as Cassie: She’s a little out of place, because her character is a straight-up horror movie chick character – and I mean chick.  All she does is get scared and do things as a result of being scared.  Actresses who bore the crap out of me in interviews when they say “I only want to play strong roles” say things like that because they’re complaining about these characters.  Come on.
  • Benedict Wong as Trey: The guy who fucks up, and can’t get over it.  Easy.
  • Chris Evans as Mace: The badass/asshole who gets everything done.  Generally, you’re not supposed to like characters like him 100%, but I do.  He’s totally badass, and the mission would have gone nowhere without him.  The crew seems to like him begrudgingly, but they also seem to recognize that he’s always right – about EVERYTHING.
  • Troy Garity as Harvey: The smug prick with a little power who is always looking out for #1.
  • Mark Strong as Pinbacker: You’ll find out.

And since I don’t want every meaningful bit of analysis to be spoiler-laden, let me just say that I had problems with the ending.  Everything stops making sense, which Sam Walker tells me (and Danny Boyle would agree, I’m sure) is by design, but that didn’t get through to me while I was watching it.  There were just too many what-the-fuck moments that took me out of the film at the end – things that are in bad horror movies that badass mofo’s like myself who are NEVER SCURRED laugh at because they’re totally stupid.

But like I said earlier, I have to give this a positive review – the negative things I pointed out were really my only problems with it, and this movie was exquisitely watchable (in the most positive connotation of the word), and had a sort of surreal/real interplay – the story was obviously not grounded in reality, but the psychology of the characters seemed very realistic and relatable – something that I canNOT enjoy a movie without.  And that makes me very excited for Slumdog Millionaire, which I plan on seeing very soon.

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall review, because I can

December 18, 2008 at 4:25 pm · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Warp speed, captain! Spoilers ahead!

I should have seen this before, Apatow, yah yah, well, it’s very funny, but not elite like Superbad or Knocked Up or Anchorman…Jason Segel, you could have made this movie without showing us your penis…Kristen Bell is good in this and there’s plenty almost-boobage, but she doesn’t do the comedy as well as she does the emotional scenes – shame…Russell Brand is un-fucking-believable as the rocker.  A brand of humor we haven’t seen before in Apatow movies – mayb it’s the British thing.  Best line in the movie is his introduction, “Excuse me, missus, I’ve lost a shoe… like this one. It’s like this one’s fellow… it’s sort of the exact opposite in fact of that – not an evil version but just, you know, a shoe like this”…Jonah Hill has finally become annoying…Mila Kunis is smoking hot when she’s not acting like a shallow high school bitch in That 70’s Show…I couldn’t help thinking every time the black bartender was on screen that Craig Robinson could have done it better.  Still, he had some awesome one-liners…I really hope that the Dracula song gets the Oscar for best song – it’s in the final 50, at least…I don’t know, Paul Rudd, you had a lot of classic potential in this character, but you played up the stoner aspect too much…I was constantly expecting a hilarious joke from Bill Hader while he was on screen, but he was painfully straight…best moment of the movie is easily Jason Segel’s reaction when the photos are deleted.

Good breakup movie – the emotion is genuine, as we’ve come to expect.  But you can feel with this movie that the Apatow gold had finally worn off – this was still better than most comedies this year, but something was missing.  And then Drillbit Taylor came out.

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THE LISTS, part 2 – Top Albums of 2008

December 15, 2008 at 3:10 am · Filed under Lists, Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ugh.  I began to write this entry while procrastinating a week’s worth of hell, and I finished it doing the same thing.  Only this time it was a different week.  Regardless, this list took a lot longer than the last, for obvious reasons, and only makes me dread making part 3 (the movies list) sometime in later January in ways that still somehow allow me to look forward to it.  Either way, it’s a nice feeling of relief to know I’m done with this, and I like my picks.  I’m eager to see how different mine are from Pitchfork.  After all, that’s the only reason I wanted to put this out so soon – to beat Pitchfork and to prevent myself from being influenced.  Anyway, here goes.

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Ultimate Mixtape mailing list

December 8, 2008 at 6:54 pm · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

Some readers of this site were recipients of my first-ever Ultimate Mixtape around the holiday season last year. For those who weren’t, it was a year in review in mixtape fashion – different from my top songs of the year, even though this year there are 40 in both. All of these songs I love, but these were picked to have a little more variety and to create a totally badass mix. I recommend it for those who would maybe like to get a look inside my head (musically, any other way would be weird) or at least maybe get exposed to something they otherwise wouldn’t. I promise that everyone who hears this mix will have something they haven’t heard before.

So I would like to extend an offer to my lucky readers. If you would like me to mail you a copy, just comment saying so and maybe send me an email (matthew.rothstein@oberlin.edu) with your address. If you’d like me to give you a copy in person, please tell me so I can burn enough CD’s now to give them all out the first time I see somebody.

I promise you that you will enjoy this mixtape. Two discs of me flossing my extreme mixmaking skills.  And they are extreme.  And they are skills.

And no, I haven’t seen any movies lately.  And the albums list is under construction.  Thanks for asking.

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THE LISTS, part 1 – Top Songs of 2008

December 2, 2008 at 4:15 am · Filed under Lists, Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I was thinking that I should stop at 25 as far as top songs go, otherwise I would have three or four songs from each of my favorite albums of the year, and that would kind of get pointless.  But then I realized when compiling the list that all of that happened within the top 25 anyway, so I expanded to 40, and here we go.  Unlike last year, for those who remember, I will give a short explanation for each track.  I won’t compare, because that would be ridiculous, but I hope that my synopses are appropriately glowing for each place in the list.  In it are The Walkmen, Born Ruffians, TV On The Radio, Beach House, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, the Dodos and much more, but this post is huge – you’ll have to hit the jump for it all.  Plus, you wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise immediately, would you?

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Champagne and pseudonyms; Notorious review

November 26, 2008 at 12:51 am · Filed under Movie Reviews ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I couldn’t be more proud of my readership for kicking into gear over the past couple days.  Speaking of readership, I forget if I’ve named you all.  Mr. Menick has his VCA, what should I have?  The Eaters? Suggestions would be appreciated in the comments section.

Continuing along my delayed Hitchcock kick, I was inspired to finally watch Notorious by my discussion with the aforementioned seasoned blogger about Hitchcock during some downtime at a certain debate tournament at which a certain less-seasoned blogger made a certain sum of money for judging a certain activity.  He brought up that Notorious certainly deserved to be mentioned in the same breath as Rear Window, Psycho and Strangers on a Train (were those the three?), and was probably above any breath that involved Vertigo and North by Northwest.  Rope, I think we agreed, was probably not even part of the same respiratory system (in a…good way?).  So that pushed me over the edge into seeing a movie I was already planning on seeing.

So that was an incredibly roundabout way of simply saying that Notorious, directed by Mr. Alfredonius Hitchcock himself and written by some guy named Ben Hecht, (Just kidding.  You can’t be considered just “some guy” when you write two movies like Notorioius and Gilda in the same year.) is the movie I’m reviewing this time.   The absolute first thing that jumps out at me about this movie is the unique and interesting way it uses three of the biggest actors of the time: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains.  Well, that’s more fair to say of the first two than of Rains – we’ve established even within the humble confines of this blog that Mr. Rains was a chameleon; a god among character actors, who manages to make all of his roles complicated and interesting.

But enough hero worship of Claude; we’ll discuss him more specifically to this movie later, along with the other biggies.

Notorious is the story of Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the daughter of a German-American convicted of war crimes committed during World War II who is asked by the United States Federal Government to work undercover in Brazil trying to catch some of her father’s associates doing…bad things.  Her liaison, TR Devlin (Grant), whom she meets at a party she threw to drink until she can’t feel anymore in reaction to her father’s conviction, is the one who introduces her to the mission.  She accepts after being reminded how much she loves America (and thus hates Nazis), deciding to abandon a family friend who wanted to take her on a boat cruise of the world, I think.  While in Rio (by the sea-o) de Janeiro, awaiting assignment and generally just hanging out, guess what the pair do? Give up? They fall in love.

But when they get the assignment, they find that Alicia has to woo an old acquaintance who is all kinds of creepily in love with her in order to get information.  He’s Alex Sebastien, played by Claude Rains, and he’s a former Nazi socialite.  It would be pretty stupid to do plot summary from that point forward, for a number of reasons.

As far as Grant goes in this movie, it’s not the only time he was in a Hitchcock movie (I count three: this, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest), and though I haven’t seen To Catch a Thief, I know that in North by Northwest, Grant also has moments where he (Devlin) vilifies his love interest for being unfaithful to him while in the line of duty.  But here, what’s interesting is he never even gets attached to Alicia (Bergman) to begin with.  He doesn’t trust her because of her history, even though he falls for her, and his exchange with Alicia about her seduction of Sebastien is less about feeling hurt and betrayed, and more about taking sick satisfaction in twisting the knife over Alicia’s guilt about her mission.  The racetrack scene is just fascinating, and what happens immediately after is positively Hithcockian (duh).  But that’s too spoilable to talk about, regrettably.  You’ll just have to be satisfied with me telling you it rules.

Bergman’s Alicia character is an incredibly compelling one, and for my money it blows her performance in Casablanca out of the water because Alicia actually has depth – emotions that go beyond “I’m conflicted.”  This is an incredibly well-developed and fully-realized character, and I was so impressed by her subtlety of expression.

Claude Rains, though, is the absolute top dog here.  You’re introduced to him as Alex Sebastien, a former Nazi before he ever steps on screen, so my feelings towards his every action were that everything was coated with this sinister, invisible layer.  But the more I watched Alex around Alicia (which is 90% of his screen time), the more I came to realize that his feelings for her were sincere, despite his evildoings.  In reflection, I feel that Rains lent such depth to his character that I could analyze it til the cows came home, and still be interested.

So this review has kind of turned into boot-licking, and I’m going to cut it off there.  Just know that the strength of this movie is in the lead performances, possibly more than any other Hitchcock film.

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Death Cab For Cutie – Narrow Stairs

November 24, 2008 at 2:03 pm · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , ,

Death Cab For Cutie - Narrow StairsI think the first time I heard Death Cab For Cutie was in the OC. That show was pretty good for a while, and there was that season where one of them worked in a bar so that they could have bands playing in the background. Looking back on it, it seems like kind of a blatant way to emphasize their role as a tastemaker, but blatantness aside, I guess I’m thankful for the introduction. Death Cab isn’t really a mainstay for me, but they are consistently enjoyable. Narrow Stairs keeps that up.

(I tried to find a youtube video of them playing The OC to link to, but all I could find was a german dub. It’s pretty surreal. Enjoy.)

The first single for this album is called “I will possess your heart.” It has maybe 4 minutes of build up before Ben Gibbard starts singing, which some might find excessive, but I think is worth being patient for. When the song kicks in proper, it doesn’t feel unnecessary. I don’t know what it does exactly, but I like it. It makes the song seem more important, even though without the long opening it would be just another pretty good song on the album. Okay, maybe it’s unnecessary.

“Cath…” is the next single (why am I focusing on the singles?) and it’s pretty pretty, if a little beentheredonethat. It’s a song with a story to tell about a gal named Cath who’s having second thoughts at the altar. I really like this lyric:

As the flashbulbs burst
She holds a smile
Like someone would hold
A crying child

Awww, right?

“No Sunlight” was an early favorite for me, what with its general bounciness and specific sense of being an actual rock and roll song from Death Cab For Cutie, which is weird, but pretty rad.

But now I have a new favorite.

Absolutely essential to comment on is the song “Grapevine Fires.” For me it’s the clear standout of the album, and worth buying just for it. The first comment on that youtube video is “Ok, now THIS is music!” I was going to say something about the song, but I guess that’ll do. No, that would be lazy, here you go: it’s so gorgeous, and gets the fuck away with the lyric “There I knew it would be alright. That everything would be alright.” I’m dying to hear a playlist of songs that contain that lyric and variants on it. They’re fucking endless, and the more you notice them the more trite it gets, but here Gibbard and co. totally sell it.

The rest of the album kind of blends together into something very pleasant but sort of bland. Sometimes that’s what you need to listen to. That’s a niche isn’t it? The production is really great. That Chris Walla fellow deserves credit beyond having a really cool name. The way the guitars sort of burble on “Your New Twin Sized Bed” is pretty and hypnotic. The opening shimmer of “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” the album’s opener, gives way to to a jarring ratatat of loud fuzzy notes which build to a great height, all the instruments coming together with the common goal of rocking out. I guess it’s just on songs like “Talking Bird” and “The Ice Is Getting Thinner”, these ballads with these slow, long notes without a lot of melody that lose me. They sound great, but the fidgety thirteen year old in me needs some kind of payoff for sitting through them.

How do you end a review again?

–Max Jacobson

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Speaking of bullshit; Jaylib review

November 24, 2008 at 3:10 am · Filed under Music Reviews ·Tagged , , , , ,

So remember what I said about no more music this year? Yeah, that wasn’t true.  What I actually meant (hey! I’m serious!) was that I’m not going to review any more current music until the year-end list is done.  What is making that harder is my curiosity.  I’m having a hard time with sticking to review.

Last night I went on a downloading binge (legal, if anyone asks, I guess), focusing on Madlib and J Dilla, two hip hop producers that got hot around the mid- to late-90’s, and started making their own music in the early 2000’s for the most part.  Their production is really interesting and a joy to discover, but they collaborated once before J Dilla died of a rare blood disease in 2006.  That collaboritive team was called Jaylib (get it?) and they released one album in 2003, titled Champion Sound, bred from each of them rapping over each other’s beats.  That album has become my favorite hip hop album of all time in the space of hearing it twice over the past two days.

When it comes to hip hop, I guess I cheat a little bit when it comes to how I approach listening to the music.  Because my primary interest in music is rock and things resembling it, I tend to take a step back when listening to something and try to take in as much as possible.  Most of my “effort” with listening comes from trying to absorb the piece as a whole (probably the reason why I like complicated music like Animal Collective, but have a harder time with noise and stuff).  As a result, I have to really concentrate hard to listen to the lyrics of something unless they’re really prominent.  Which means that when I listen to hip hop, I get more preoccupied with production than most.  That’s why I love Spank Rock so much – it’s so interestingly put together.  And that’s why I love J Dilla and Madlib so much.

Which is why Jaylib is mindblowingly good to me.  Now, reviewing hip hop is almost as much of a challenge for me as reviewing things like dubstep – it makes me insecure not being tapped into the greater culture, because I fear having some guy who’s like, “I know hip hop, and you’re a stupid asshole.” I know that would probably never happen, but then again, that’s why it’s an insecurity.  But the way I see it, having a visionary producer rapping means that that rap has a finely tuned ear for how to flow with the production.  As I noticed (and as was pointed out to me by some other reviews I read), the lyrics here aren’t all that deep or all that interesting – they’re fun, but pretty shallow, not dumb, but not at all contemplative or declarative either (except as far as declarations of Jaylib’s prowess or simply, their new existence).  But their production.  Oh, their production.

It’s not exactly like nothing I’ve ever heard (it seems to take influence from instrumental hip hop producers, most notably [and most famous] DJ Shadow), it’s put together so interestingly that it’s this whole new animal when combined with the vocals.  It’s just, music.  It’s hip hop by every defining definition, but if you’re someone who’s heard too much absolute shit blasted at you by top-40 stations and mixtape rappers who have great rhymes but couldn’t care less what it’s over, it doesn’t sound like hip hop.  It sounds like something too fully formed.

The whole album has this laid back, but still energized vibe to it that’s really engaging for me, and it’s really conducive to full-album listening.  When your production is good enough, your only worry is overloading the listeners, and they do a great job of not doing much.  But their first proper track, after cool intro “L.A. to Detroit” (each of their hometowns), is “McNasty Filth” (cool name, right?), and it blew me away entirely.  They loaded so much into it and it’s not fast-paced, but extraordinarily high-energy.  It’s definitely a statement track – the duo saying that they are a force to be reckoned with.

Some other highlights are “The Heist” and “The Mission,” back to back, and for the same reason – their ability to keep downtempo hip hop interesting and fresh is absolutely astounding to me.  But really, after “McNasty Filth”, Champion Sound tends to maintain about the same level of laid-back awesomeness.  And that’s good enough for me.  Honestly, this is the best thing I’ve heard all year, and I’m seriously considering putting it in my all-time top 20, but I feel like it would kind of decrease the stature of the list if something could break into it after two days.  I’ll wait a while with it.

Thanks for the feedback on the changes, guys.  And keep those comments coming, it’s nice to know I’m still relevant in some way or another.

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