Comfort of Strangers, Beth Orton (2006)

First time through you could be excused for thinking this sounds like background music at Starbucks. But Orton is truly protean, and here she is hitched up with the insanely brilliant Jim O'Rourke on the boards, and every song here rewards repeated listenings; they get weirder and deeper the more you listen. What I love best is the way songs just end when they're done doing what they set out to do. That's a hard skill for a poet to learn: When to eschew finishing in favor of ending.

I've loved Orton for more than a decade. I believe that if she had decided to promote herself harder, she could have been a superstar. She didn't, and I think she's probably stayed sane and happy as a result. I hear that she's got a new one coming, at last, in 2012. I'm excited, but I haven't minded waiting.

Encounters at the End of the World, Werner Herzog (2007)

In which the NSF flies Herzog to Antarctica so that he can ask a penguin researcher, "Does a penguin ever go insane when they have simply had it with the colony?" If you love Herzog, this will tickle you pink. Dour laconic condemnations of civilization, breathless Caspar David Friedrich-esque romantic ejaculations in the face of ineffable landscapes, a fascination with damaged and fragile characters that comes across as both exploitative and sympathetic at the same time (the scene with the traumatized man who "escaped" from something he can't even talk about (East Germany?) and proudly shows Herzog the rucksack he has ready at all times, should he need to escape again, is without question my favorite moment in this film), and always, always, the magnetic attraction to oblivion. When Herzog talks about the dangers of diving under the ice, or how easy it is to get lost in a blizzard, or the way a penguin will sometimes become disoriented and start walking away from rather than toward the life-giving sea, you understand very clearly that he doesn't dread these disasters; he longs for them.

Herzog continues to make fiction films, but more and more his best attention seems to be directed toward documentaries. (Which, after all, is the more interesting movie, Grizzly Man or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans?) Might it be that for a mature artist, the claptrap of artifice begins to seem an impediment rather than an aid to the realization of one's dramatic -- and even aesthetic -- goals? Discuss.

A History of Violence, David Cronenberg (2005)

Wow, I've sat through some serious dreck from Cronenberg in the past and convinced myself it was complex, citing the A-effect, etc., but this is so stupidly wooden and vice-versa I couldn't spin it if my dissertation depended upon it. Go watch Siodmak's The Killers instead.

The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akın (2007)

Watching this, I was thinking, what was that other terrific movie I saw that dealt with the interpenetration of Turkish and German cultures, and then I remembered it was Head-On, from 2004, and then I found that Akin directed that, too! This one's a bit less visceral, but it's just as affecting and intelligent. This is a young director to watch.

It's too bad that Washington D.C. is so far away from Kabul. If the flight between them were as brief as the one between Hamburg and Istanbul, I think the world would be a different place. 

Ketchup

These endless summer days I ingest culture faster than I can process it. In addition to a lot of material about PTSD, which I'm reading for a writing project, this is what's been passing in front of my eyeballs. 

White Material, Claire Denis (2009). Denis goes back to Africa. Isabelle Hupert makes me nervous. The politics here are a mess, totally confused. A good example of how sloppy thinking likes to masquerade as ambiguity. But it's Claire Denis, so of course we must still love it.

Somewhere, Sofia Coppola (2010). Just letting the camera keep running on a lifeless scene doesn't make it Cassavetes. This is a deeply boring movie.

Another Year, Mike Leigh (2010). Another heartbreaker from Mike Leigh. It's not really a story so much as it is a kind of temporal vitrine, in which are displayed a half-dozen fully-realized characters, interacting with each other and trying to be alive.

True Grit, Joel and Ethan Coen (2010). Lacks the Coen whimsy of Fargo, etc. and also the Coen fatedness of No Country for Old Men. Fine, but neither here nor there.

F for Fake, Orson Welles (1973). Sloppy, self-indulgent, self-important, gimmicky, dull. And that's coming from someone who's genuinely interested in and who has great patience for this theme. Poor old fucker.

American Experience: Stonewall Uprising, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner (2010). Nice doc. Lots of fascinating footage of Village life in the 60's.

The Fighter, David O. Russell (2010). Stolid family drama, worth seeing. Has the kind of genuineness and moral seriousness of purpose you rarely see at the multiplex these days. It's about a hundred times less interesting than, say, Raging Bull, but I think contemporary audiences are so incredibly grateful when they're not pandered to, they wind up thinking something like this is art for the ages.

Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, Jonathan Shay (1994). Perfect idea, poorly executed with slack, repetitive prose and a lot of unnecessary self-dealing.

Speed the Plow, David Mamet (1988). Dialogue perfection. Perfect dramatic efficiency.

Still Life: A Documentary, Emily Mann (1982). Really lively, allusive, slippery drama about the collision of eros and thanatos in the post-war life of a Vietnam veteran.

Lethal Warriors, David Philipps (2010). Philipps didn't ask for this job; he was a sports writer in Colorado Springs when the "Band of Brothers" started coming back from Iraq and killing each other and others. Philipps does an admirable job of stepping up and becoming a real reporter, covering some of the saddest stories of the war. Good, thorough, clear reporting. See also the Frontline episode, The Wounded Platoon.

Louie, Louis C.K. (2010-). Makes Seinfeld look like Happy Days.

The Passenger, Michelangelo Antonioni (1975). Oh, it's horribly pretentious and aimless and even sometimes irresponsible, but it's also of course gorgeous and dizzying poetry. I had to go get my camera to take pictures of it. Then I had to spend an hour planning a trip to Andalusia. 

The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924). Been clambering up this Alp since May. Certainly skimmed some of the later Settembrini discourses, but I genuinely enjoyed almost all of these 700 pages. Took extensive notes elsewhere. This is utterly worth your time. Read it while you're young. What's it about? It's about a young man who decides -- the verb is too strong -- to absent himself from history.

Port of Shadows, Marcel Carné (1938). Oh, France. Merci pour Michèle Morgan.

Damages, Glenn Kessler, Todd A. Kessler & Daniel Zelman (2007-)

This is one of the most claustrophobic and nasty pieces of television I've ever seen. There's not a single likeable character, everyone is a lying and cheating power-mad narcissist out to stab everyone else in the back and then self-justify. Worst of all, no one even seems to enjoy the overripe fruits of their iniquitous labors. The show is completely humorless and profoundly amoral. Watching it makes me feel dirty and ashamed, but I'm halfway through it now.

Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone (2008)

Hoo! I let this sit in my queue way too long. When's the last time you saw a Cosa Nostra picture that didn't feature a laundry list of cliches? Garrone, working off the best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, tells five distinct, occasionally overlapping stories of life under the Camorra, from small-time neighborhood hoods with delusions of grandeur to multi-million Euro syndicates dedicated to the expedient (and illegal) disposition of industrial waste. There's some blood, but the movie's delightfully free of the kind of swagger and celebration of violence in American mafia movies. Most of the people involved are involved because they're trapped, bored, scared, resigned, stupid, or some combination of these. Ironically, the scenes of hopelessness played out in the courtyards of the housing projects can't help but remind me of turn of the century American tenements and the organized crime that blossomed there. Old world or new world, past or future, bathtub gin or pirated DVDs, desperate people will always do desperate things.

Julia, Erick Zonca (2008)

I would wager that a lot of Europeans think this sort of thing happens in the USA all the time.

Who knows, maybe it does.

This is an update of Cassavettes' Gloria, but the madness here is less about nuance and more about flat-out intensity. Swinton goes completely Oscar-snippet batshit in almost every scene. It must have been exhausting for her; it's exhausting just to watch. Still, it's gripping, at least until the final half hour, where Zonca suddenly and inexplicably gets bogged down in what seems to be some sense of responsibility to honor the ridiculously complicated sets of double- and triple-crosses the plot has imposed upon him. Unusual for a Frenchman to fall under the misapprehension that plot matters more than character. 

I Am Love, Luca Guadagnino (2009)

I suppose opera is an early form of the music video, right? Similarly, this is a sort of music video for some lovely pre-existing John Adams pieces, and if you're a fan of his carefully nailed-down chaos, you may be the sort who will enjoy this. As in opera and music videos, plot here runs a distant second in importance to mood and tone. While we are tempted at times to read the story here as an indictment of the inbred and isolated bourgeoisie, any such avenue of thought very quickly runs into trouble, as visual style trumps substance over and over again. I'd go so far as to say that Guadagnino makes Antonioni's La Notte look like a Marxist tract.

Thus not exactly my cup of prosecco, but I can't claim not to have enjoyed it. It's an exact replica of what we used to call "art-house" pictures, and you don't see too many of them any more.

Ketchup

Zeitoun, Dave Eggers (2009). Eggers tells the story of a remarkable family in a very easy-going and simple voice.

Animal Kingdom, David Michôd (2010). Stark, crisp, finally melodramatic.

Restrepo, Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington (2010). They should show this as a curtain-raiser before every war movie. War isn't hell, or glory, or dramatic; it's tedious, confusing, and random.

The Town, Ben Affleck (2010). I've never much cared for Affleck, but this is twice now that he's turned in some really fine work as a director.

Howl, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman (2010). Wow, totally unwatchable! I made it up to the part where they're on drugs and everything turns into an undersea cartoon or something.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, Banksy (2010). Sly and fun.

Friday Night Lights (2006-). Has there ever been a more emotionally manipulative show? This thing constantly makes me cry, even though there are precious few characters I really have any sympathy with. It's weird.

The Larry Sanders Show (1992-1998). I got weirdly hooked on this for a while there. Shandling is on the one hand hard to watch and on the other I can't turn away.

Four Lions, Chris Morris (2010). This seemed like a bad idea. I had to check. It was.

The Next Three Days, Paul Haggis (2010). This was tight and gripping. Haggis knows what he's doing.

The American, Anton Corbjin (2010). Lifeless.

The Social Network, David Fincher (2010). Eh.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Stanley Kubrick (1964). Every other year or so.

Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg (2010). Very nicely done.

Mesrine: Killer Instinct, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, Jean-Francois Richet (2008).

The French are so easily seduced by even the most caricatured image of the outlaw. Richet thinks he's showing us Mesrine's pathos but all that really comes across is how much he worships the man. Still, this is super entertaining and great to look at.

The Way Back, Peter Weir (2010). Almost absurdly epic. Absolutely worth the afternoon.

Colonel Chabert, Honore de Balzac (1832). Superb.

Salt, Phillip Noyce (2010). I can't remember anything about this now.

Cold Souls, Sophie Barthes (2009). Anything with Paul Giamatti is worth a look, in this case only barely.

The Tourist, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2010). 

The Green Hornet, Michel Gondry (2011).

Two incoherent and atrocious payday films from relatively interesting directors. It's almost like they're trying to be as contemptuous of you for watching this dreck as they can be.

Fair Game, Doug Liman (2010). This is the dramatization of the Plame affair and one of the best films I've seen about the Bush administration's post-9/11 rush to judgment. Naomi Watts and Sean Penn are both terrific. Highly recommended. 

Even the Rain, Icíar Bollaín (2010). Nice conceit, nice try, but it turns out a muddle.

Etc. etc. etc.

Ketchup

The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995). Limpid prose kept me reading all 9000 pages, but there's not much there there.

Youth in Revolt, Miguel Arteta (2009).
Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Edgar Wright (2010).
Cleverish enough, I guess. I like this Michael Cera fine, but why can't the protagonist in these things ever be a girl?

Specimen Days, Michael Cunningham (2005). Cunningham's a lovely writer sentence by sentence. The concept seemed too high-concept for me at first, but I grew into it and wound up enjoying this a great deal.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg (2010). One of the last great showbiz workaholics.

The Decalogue, Krzysztof Kieślowski (1988). If you've seen it, you know. If you haven't, you should.

Style Wars, Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant (1983). Terrific, fascinating documentary about the rise of graffiti and hip hop culture. Amazing to see NYC in the early 80's and realize how much time has gone by. Provided me with at least one long-sought source for a sample I'd wondered about: "You only specialize in one thing, you can't call yourself the all-out king."

Foul Play, Colin Higgins (1978). Second only to Seems Like Old Times on my list of Hawn/Chase childhood favorites. One of those 70's flicks that's simultaneously total fluff and highly clever.

The Informers, Juan Gabriel Vasquez (2004). There was no reason not to like this, but for some reason I couldn't engage with it.

Spies of the Balkans, Alan Furst (2010)
The Arms Maker of Berlin, Dan Fesperman (2009)
WWII espionage fiction: My annual holiday indulgence. A return to form for Furst, who seemed to me to be phoning it in the last few times. I blame Fesperman for not being Furst, but that's of course unfair.

The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko (2010). This isn't perfect, but it's very good, and it gives me a lot of hope. A reasonably serious and insightful story about a family of two moms and two kids going through a crisis of confidence, written and directed by an out Lesbian. Some might say that the achievement of the movie is that it doesn't even matter that the parents are gay, that it's just a story about a family crisis. That's only about half true. The parents' Lesbianism is integral to the story, but it doesn't determine the story. To me, this seems like a tremendous achievement; the piece neither claims special status for the couple nor asserts that this couple is just like any other. The view of human sexuality on offer here is also refreshing. It ain't Foucault, but it's way more sophisticated than the permanent adolescence Hollywood usually peddles in the bedroom.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Niels Arden Oplev (2009)

"All the idealizations of the female from the earliest days of courtly love have been in fact devices to deprive her of freedom and self-determination." -- Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel

This movie is repulsive. It's hard to know where to start. How about this: Does that woman over there look like a "girl" to you? Me neither. But it's important to call her a girl, since she represents the ideal of feminine innocence, sullied by masculine perversion, but strong enough to exact revenge when the man she loves is in danger. Like Lara Croft, Nikita, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, etc. etc. etc., Lisbeth Salander is both a totally vulnerable innocent child and a self-contained, self-sufficient, heartless killing machine. She provides everything men want, but asks for nothing in return. (Perhaps the most emblematic sequence here is the one where Salander uses Blomkvist as a human dildo to get herself off. He is of course delighted, but he's even more delighted the next morning, when he gears up for playful post-coital banter, and then realizes that Salander won't require that of him.) The men around Salander decide when, where, and under what circumstances to flip her switch, depending on their needs. (Maggie Cheung's Irma Vep is a rare and useful instance: a self-conscious version of this madonna/murderer type).

Oh, there's so much more. For example: The mindless assignment of every possible outlandish and unlikely depravity to the family of capitalists has the effect of cloaking rather than revealing the actual evils the family business likely perpetrates. The Nazi/rapist/murderer/monster is here defeated, but the conglomerate not only chugs merrily along, it gains a scion which will help ensure its continued existence.

Ugh, it's making me tired to think about. Would someone else please write the term paper on this? I'd recommend starting with the horrific rape/reverse-rape sequence, and Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.

Anyone thinking right now that I need to lighten up, it's just a movie, should ask themselves this simple question: What would happen to this story if the journalist was a 45 year old woman and the hacker a 25 year old "boy"? For starters, it would never have seen the light of day. Why do you suppose that is?

This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Kirby Dick (2006)

Just what I needed: More corporate/puritanical cultural manipulation to be pissed off about. Dick is an annoying person and is overly fond of ginning up gotcha moments, but here, as in Outrage, his basic premise and his, well, outrage, are well founded. The MPAA rating system effectively controls what does and does not appear on the country's movie screens, and it's run as a homophobic misogynist pro-war star chamber.

I feel sad. I think I'm going to go to bed.

Any Other City, Life Without Buildings (2001)

Hooked fast by this all week. Altered Images meets Patti Smith?

The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds (2009)

There's not a whole lot to this novel--it's short, and feels even shorter--but what's here is admirably written and often delightful. In 1837, the rural poet John Clare--once celebrated, now forgotten by the literary powers that be--ends up in an asylum run by a spendthrift renaissance man "doctor" as inept as an inventor as he is primitive as a psychiatrist. Another of the doctor's patients is the brother of Alfred Tennyson, who's come to the neighborhood to be near his troubled sib. Nothing particularly surprising happens: The doctor's daughter falls for Tennyson, Clare hangs out with Roma in the forest, the doctor schemes and goes broke, other patients at the asylum are troubled by their various demons, etc. Still, Foulds--also a poet--writes with clarity and grace, and there's more than enough here to please and amuse you on two or three plane rides, depending on their length.

Defiance, Edward Zwick (2008)

This is a movie of the story of the Bielski partisans. It's not a great movie, but it's a great story. You can't eat popcorn while you watch Shoah, but you can eat popcorn while you watch this. I feel kind of sick to my stomach saying that. I don't like Holocaust movies, generally speaking, since I don't like texts that purport to represent the un-representable. But this isn't really a Holocaust movie. That said, I didn't really like it, either.

Spartan, David Mamet (2004)

Val Kilmer is a modern-day Spartan, a special forces / CIA / Secret Service type (we're not sure which) whose job is to execute the orders of his superiors, not question them or think them over. But when confronted with irrefutable evidence that his superiors are using him for evil rather than good, he faces a choice. An elegant problem play from Mamet, coated in a thin veneer of action-movie candy so as to sell tickets. Does that last make Mamet something of a reverse aesthetic Spartan? True to his art until marketplace exigencies require him to crank up the special effects machines? Not really, because I think he actually enjoys the shootouts for their own sake. With a very nice turn by the always-excellent William H. Macy, whose parents long had no idea, I'm sure, that they were put on earth expressly to provide David Mamet with his ideal actor.

By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño (2000)

Marvelous. A playful and morbid treatise on how political, religious, and literary institutions corrupt and compromise the individual. The passages where the protagonist is summoned to lead Pinochet and his generals in a seminar on Marxism are sublime.

This is my second Bolaño. I'm starting with the early small ones before getting to the later big ones everyone professes to love. So far I'm delighted; he reminds me by turns of many of my favorites like Sebald and Bernhard, but is utterly distinctive.

City Island, Raymond De Felitta (2009)

"Quirky" "indie" comedies are usually so tiresome, but thanks to some brisk writing and energetic performances, this was really pretty charming!

A Prophet, Jacques Audiard (2009)

Oh, I don't think so. First, in terms of style, everything annoying about contemporary French cinema is in full effect. Turgid symbolism, gratuitous passages of stylized shooting, plink plonk dramatique piano music and vapid ironic pop music . . . ugh. Audiard seems determined that the very celluloid should emote constantly. Second, what exactly is the story here? We French used to have these bad guys, the Corsicans. They were nasty and violent but at least they spoke something close to French, and they looked French, and acted French, and went to the same churches as the French. Now look what's displaced them: Arabs. Dirty stinking double-crossing Arabs. The Corsicans took them in and showed them the ropes, and the Arabs turned around and hung their benefactors with same. Méfiez-vous, peuple de France! The Arabs are learning to read, and the next thing you know they'll be driving BMW's! Double ugh. This movie's prophetic all right, and the prophesy is racism and paranoia.