Top 12 Albums of 2012

There was simply too much great music this year to narrow it down to a top ten list.  So despite the fact that I’m sure I haven’t heard a bunch of this year’s great releases (and may only become aware of the existence of some of them through other people’s year-end lists), I’ve expanded my look at the year’s best music to a top twelve.

1-2)  Killer Mike always seemed a little out of place as a guest rapper on his old mentor OutKast’s albums (despite that group’s wildly flexible sound), but on his sixth solo album, R.A.P. Music, the Atlanta MC finally found the perfect marriage of vocals and beats by enlisting ace producer El-P to create the music for all twelve tracks.  The New York beatsmith’s trademark combination of dystopian soundscapes and hard-hitting drums has never sounded better than it does under Mike’s fiery vocals, and the pairing works equally well on speaker-destroying posse cuts (“Big Beast”), rapid-fire battle raps (“Go!”), fiery political protests (“Reagan”), and moving tributes to the power of music (the title track).  The consistent quality and polish of the Killer Mike album is all the more impressive considering that El-P also released his third solo album this year.  Cancer for Cure is less an obvious leap forward for El-P than a refinement of the sound of his excellent I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead (2007), but the improvements in both the carefully layered productions and dense rhymes become clear on repeated headphone listens.  El-P has never sounded as direct and legible as he does on the new album, his most accessible and emotionally affecting work to date.  Though El-P shut the doors to his venerable Definitive Jux label in 2010, albums like R.A.P. Music and Cancer 4 Cure find that collective’s legacy of tightly constructed, forward-thinking hip hop albums fully intact.

 3)  No current band has a sound as otherworldly as Dirty Projectors, who combine theatrical vocals, sweeping strings, African guitars, and off-kilter hip hop beats into an utterly distinctive aesthetic.  The group has been steadily pushing toward a more accessible vision since their great 2007 LP Rise Above, and this year’s Swing Lo Magellan is their prettiest and most pop friendly set of tracks to date.  Lead singer/songwriter/producer/guitarist Dave Longstreth has found a way to make his songs more approachable without sacrificing any of the band’s considerable eccentricity.  Commercially, the band remains a respected indie rock act rather than a world-beating chart sensation.  But on a pure sonic level, Dirty Projectors can be placed alongside The Beatles, David Bowie, Bjork, and OutKast as a group whose avant-garde risks are virtually inseparable from their pop smarts.

 4)  It is a testament to the quality of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange that the album’s content was not ultimately obscured by the many headlines addressing the revelation that the Odd Future-affiliated singer is bisexual (which is sadly still somewhat of a taboo in the macho world of R&B and hip hop).  With his first full-length LP (following last year’s Nostalgia, Ultra mixtape) Ocean announces himself as an artist too multi-faceted and strange to fit comfortably under any label.  The breadth of styles on display here recalls such genre-bending classics as The Beatles’ White Album (1968) and Andre 3000’s The Love Below (2003), and though Ocean clearly has the vocal chops and arranging skills for conventional pop music, he consistently approaches his productions with the curiosity and imagination of a mad scientist.

5-6)  On last year’s twin EPs Passed Me By and We Stay Together, Andy Stott proved his talent for creating moody soundscapes too detailed to be called minimalist and too unsettling to be called ambient.  Stott’s new full length Luxury Problems blends his trademark lurching beats with the hauntingly beautiful, quasi-operatic vocals of the producer’s former piano teacher, Alison Skidmore, leading to some of the richest and most dynamic electronic music of the year.  Flying Lotus’ Until the Quiet Comes is equally gorgeous, a wonderful continuation of the aesthetic of 2010’s outstanding Cosmogramma.  The Los Angeles producer’s unique mix of Madlib-style dusty beats, rubbery keyboards, elegant live strings, and exotic jazz touches remains one of the most hypnotic sounds in modern music.

 7)  Ariel Pink’s background as a highly prolific lo-fi bedroom recorder suggests that he should be considered part of a lineage that includes such spirited weirdoes as Wild Man Fischer and Wesley Willis.  But while it’s true that Pink has been known to use armpit noises as drum tracks, and to write weirdly sincere lyrics about things like his desire to eat a schnitzel, Pink also manages to marry his considerable eccentricity to genuine songcraft.  With the possible exception of Deerhunter/Atlas Sound frontman Bradford Cox, nobody in contemporary music is as skilled as Pink at combining hypnotic creepiness and radio-ready catchiness.  Mature Themes is Pink’s tightest and prettiest sounding set of songs to date, but his newfound professionalism hasn’t prevented him from writing nonsensical tributes to Klaus Kinski or singing a cheery song with the chorus “let’s dine on pink slime.”

 8)  On their ninth album, Tindersticks stretch the limits of their carefully constructed, cinematic pop music to organically incorporate elements of virtually every genre imaginable.  The Something Rain opens with a dryly funny spoken-word short story and ends with a Morricone-style dramatic instrumental, and finds the band effortlessly switching between styles in its middle tracks.

 9)  Simultaneously drawing inspiration from the creative resurgence brought about by his cameos on recent Gorillaz albums and by his unfortunate colon cancer diagnosis, soul veteran Bobby Womack released The Bravest Man in the Universe, his first album of original material since 1994.  Rather than attempt to resurrect his classic ‘70s sound, Womack enlisted Damon Albarn and Richard Russell to provide sleek trip hop backgrounds for his beautifully ragged outpourings of grief, regret, and defiant optimism.  Shortly before the release of the album, Womack officially beat his cancer; here’s hoping that this album was the start of a long creative revitalization and not the last testament that it seems that it was intended to be.

 10)  On last year’s download-only release Section.80, Kendrick Lamar displayed incredible lyrical and vocal dexterity, but his best tracks were buried under a pile of common rap album flaws (subpar guest verses, off-putting choruses, wildly inconsistent social messages).  So it’s a pleasant surprise that the Compton MC’s major label debut is one of the tightest and most intelligently conceived albums of the year.  Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is presented as an audio documentary of Lamar’s adolescent growing pains, and, unlike most concept albums, it actually follows a clear, coherent, and moving narrative.  Even the between-song skits feel essential here, contributing to the album’s uncomfortable intimacy while putting an interesting spin on the tracks they accompany.  As an individual track, “Backseat Freestyle” would appear to be a misogynistic trifle (albeit one with a memorably insane beat), but the context of the album turns the flagrant sexism and macho chest-beating on its head by positioning the song as the first recording of a nervous kid trying desperately to look cool.

11)  Most people agree that Jack White is one of the most talented people working in rock music today, but it’s often seemed as if his skills have been spread too thin between the several bands that he’s a member of and his various projects as a producer.  Blunderbuss is White’s first official solo album and the first of his projects to show off the full range of his abilities.  White is at the top of his game as a songwriter and a performer throughout the album, whether playing hard rock (“Sixteen Saltines”), country (the title track), folk (“Hip Eponymous Poor Boy”), or piano-based blues (“Weep Themself to Sleep”).

12)  On past albums like When the Pawn … (1999) and Extraordinary Machine (2005), Fiona Apple has surrounded her piano-based songs with dense arrangements featuring carnival-esque organs, soaring strings, and exotic world music touches.  Apple’s stripped-down new album The Idler Wheel… proves that her songwriting and performing is strong enough to compel without the benefit of such accoutrements.  The ten tracks basically consist of Apple’s piano and her touring percussionist Charley Drayton’s unconventional beats, the minimal backings providing the perfect accompaniment to Apple’s exceptionally raw vocals.

HONORABLE MENTION

Air’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune has the appearance of a minor work, because it’s largely a collection of songs conceived as background music for Georges Melies’ seminal 1902 sci-fi film of the same name.  While the tracks function wonderfully as incidental silent film accompaniment, they work equally well separated from the visuals.  The rubbery synths, clanging percussion, and carefully treated guitars add up to the French duo’s finest set of songs since 2004’s Talkie Walkie.

Dan Deacon’s mixture of Phillip Glass-style minimalist live instrumentation and hyper electronica beats remains one of the most exciting sounds in modern music, though the relatively somber tone of the new America can’t quite compete with the mad sugar rush of 2009’s masterpiece Bromst.  The four-part “U.S.A.” suite is among the most ambitious and sophisticated pieces of music recorded this year, a genre-defying synthesis of everything that the multi-talented composer has learned up to this point that sends a message that he’ll continue to explore in the future.

Breakthrough is officially the full-length solo debut of talented electronica producer The Gaslamp Killer, though practically every track is a collaboration with either frequent vocal partner Gonjasufi, like-minded producers like Daedelus, or adventurous live musicians.  The variety of approaches on display prevents the album from being as coherent overall as the albums by Andy Stott, Flying Lotus, or Dan Deacon, but the quality is impressively consistent throughout all sixteen tracks.  The Gaslamp Killer’s spirit of fun throughout this album is infectious, and though his army of collaborators all make their voices heard, they never drown out his distinctive brand of gritty psychedelia.

ALSO NOTEABLE

In the eyes of most music fans, Aesop Rock and Nas are two MCs whose new music is never going to match the quality of their most famous releases.  And while neither Aesop’s new Skelethon nor Nas’ Life is Good deserve to ever rival the popularity of Labor Days (2002) or Illmatic (1994), they are nonetheless very solid releases that find each rapper quietly getting down to business while avoiding the flaws that have hampered some of their other recent work.  Aesop’s CD deploys a more eclectic musical style than some of his past albums have (despite the fact that the rapper produced each of the tracks himself this time), while Life is Good features much better beats and far fewer awkward pop crossover attempts than the average Nas album.

The tracks on Big Boi’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors have a more mixed success rate than we’re used to from the OutKast veteran.  But while Big Boi’s attempts to incorporate contemporary synth-pop and rock sounds into his usual aesthetic don’t always pay off, it always sounds like he is at least attempting something interesting, and even the album’s handful of duds aren’t bad enough to be embarrassing.  Of course, it helps that Big Boi remains simultaneously one of the least predictable and most consistently entertaining lyricists and vocalists in hip hop.

Masked rapper MF DOOM delivered a freakishly prolific series of releases in the mid-2000s (including the all-time genre classics Madvillainy and MM…Food, both released in 2004), then disappeared into the shadows, releasing the solid yet vaguely disappointing Born Like This in 2009 and little else in the ensuing years.  With the help of underground producer Jneiro Jarel, DOOM made a surprising return this year with Key to the Kuffs, an endearingly modest album made under the pseudonym JJ DOOM.  Perhaps the album isn’t as exciting as the endlessly delayed Madvillainy 2 or DOOM/Ghostface collaborative releases, but it’s always nice to hear the world’s most reliably odd MC rapping over eclectic sets of gritty beats, and the album’s odd detours (such as a frantic pop song called “’Bout the Shoes,” featuring a singer named Boston Fielder) are as satisfying as its main tracks.

The relentless flood of free hip hop mixtapes makes it virtually impossible to keep up with the state of modern hip hop, but a few key releases stood out from the crowd this year.  Clams Casino’s Instrumental Mixtape 2 is exactly what it sounds like, but the producer’s moody ambient/hip hop hybrid approach remains compelling despite its growing familiarity, and his beats continue to sound better without the vocals of frequent collaborators like A$AP Rocky and Lil’ B.  Flying Lotus somehow had time to record both the great Until the Quiet Comes album and the very strong Duality mixtape this year, the latter project being the debut of his rapping Captain Murphy alter-ego.  The pitch-shifted vocals and dusty beats that Lotus utilizes for his Captain Murphy project add up to a sound that is less utterly distinctive than his electronica work.  But while Duality owes a heavy debt to both Madlib’s Quasimoto side-project and to the lyrical aesthetic of Odd Future, it already feels like Captain Murphy is a peer of those artists rather than a mere imitator.

I’m still waiting for Gonjasufi to make a proper follow-up to his mind-blowing 2010 breakthrough A Sufi and a Killer, but his subsequent minor releases have been solid excuses to hear more of his otherworldly croaking vocals-plus-psychedelic beats aesthetic.  2012 brought the “mini album” Mu.Zz.Le, a strong 29-minute suite of supremely offbeat music.

Lightning Bolt remain the world’s loudest and most intense band despite having only two members, bassist Brian Gibson and drummer/vocalist Brian Chippendale.  They are not, however, the world’s most prolific band, having not put out a proper studio release since 2009’s great Earthly Delights.  This year the duo put out Oblivion Hunter, a collection of songs and improvisations that the band recorded while preparing for Earthly Delights.  These seven cuts aren’t as strong as what ultimately wound up on Earthly Delights – and several of the tracks sound distinctly like warm-ups for that album’s Middle Eastern-inspired “The Sublime Freak” – but new music by Lightning Bolt is always welcome, even if comes in the form of what are essentially demo recordings.

Several of my other favorite bands put out solid albums this year, though none of them were strong enough to crack the top 12.  But here’s some quick shout-outs to Grizzly Bear’s Shields, which is not as pretty or immediately satisfying as 2009’s Veckatimest but is nonetheless a fine set of moody chamber pop; The Mars Volta’s Noctouriquet, which (despite having the year’s most ridiculous album title) finds the band continuing to move confidently toward compact song structures without softening their prog rock eccentricity; and Spiritualized’s Sweet Heart Sweet Light, which has a number of exciting rock/gospel/jazz hybrids but peters out with a couple of dull tracks toward the end of the album.

Orphaned Films of 2011-2012

My year-end movie lists only take into account films that received public theatrical screenings in the Milwaukee area between January 1^st and December 31^st of the year in question.  Because options for seeing many independent and international films theatrically are limited in Milwaukee, a number of films manage to slip through the cracks and miss the city entirely.  Some relatively high profile films are deemed by their distributors to be too important to screen at the Milwaukee Film Festival or at the UWM Union Theatre, even as the management of the Landmark Theatre chains decide that the films aren’t commercial enough to devote screen space to.  The films listed below are all fairly major releases that came out in some parts of the U.S. in 2011 or early 2012, but never made it to Milwaukee theatres, most likely for the reasons outlined above, thereby making them ineligible for either my 2011 or 2012 year-end lists.  They are all movies I was interested in seeing, so I caught up with them either on DVD or on Netflix streaming, and my brief thoughts on them are presented here.

The Future (Miranda July, USA, 91 min.) 

Ever since her impressive breakthrough Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) made her a well-known indie figure, Miranda July has had to battle against naysayers claiming that her art is overly twee and precious.  The Future seems like a direct response to July’s critics. The film follows two stunted thirtysomethings (July and Hamish Linklater) as they set aside a month to do all of the vaguely defined awesome stuff that they’d be doing if they weren’t tied down by their menial jobs.  July is clearly critical of her characters’ inability to grow up and be productive, and her incisive takedown of post-grad stasis has real sting (and hits pretty close to home, honestly).  Her various methods of stylizing her points have mixed success, though.  Periodic narration from a cat that the couple plan to adopt and a bizarre interpretive dance are surprisingly effective, but asides featuring a young girl burying herself up to her neck in her backyard and an eccentric old man reading sexually explicit love letters seem less purposeful.  B-

 House of Pleasures (Bertrand Bonello, France, 122 min.)

Bertrand Bonello’s look at a financially troubled Parisian brothel circa 1899-1900 manages to simultaneously work as a dreamy piece of vintage eroticism and a matter of fact look at the brutal struggles that have always accompanied the world’s oldest profession.  The hazy, impressionistic tone is frequently disrupted by moments of stark brutality (the slashing of one prostitute’s face, the acting out of a creepy “human doll” fetish).  But rather than overplay the misery of the sex workers’ situation (or the boorishness of their clientele), Bonello turns the film into an oddly touching tribute to the camaraderie between them.  The director’s more eccentric stylistic choices yield somewhat mixed results – he makes effective use of split screen at several points, but his anachronistic use of classic R&B seems a little pointless.  Still, no one can say that House of Pleasures isn’t distinctive.  The film’s most audacious image, involving a prostitute crying tears of milky semen, reportedly inspired derisive laughter at Cannes, but is genuinely disquieting in context.  B

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, USA, 150 min.)

Margaret was perhaps a bit overhyped by critics sympathetic to its tortured production history (it was filmed in 2005, then endlessly delayed when the studio insisted that writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s epic vision be cut down to 2 ½ hours or less).  While the film’s messiness is ultimately purposeful, in the sense that it mirrors real life rather than conforming to a familiar story structure, it is true that some of the supporting characters (portrayed by an exceptional ensemble cast that includes Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Kieran Culkin, Mark Ruffalo, and Matthew Broderick) get short shrift in this somewhat compromised cut.  That said, it’s hard to think of another film that provides such a thorough look at the life and psychology of its main character (Anna Paquin in a fearless, career-best performance), a high school student who manages to turn the accidental death of a woman (Allison Janney) into the center of her own personal melodrama.  It’s only because the film is so long and rambling that Lonergan is able to touch on virtually every facet of his protagonist’s life, exposing her undeveloped yet passionate political views in classroom debates one moment and revealing her vulnerability in an awkwardly tender bedroom scene the next.  Though the film mostly plays out in a series of raw, Cassavetes-style personal interactions, it is ultimately more intellectually engaging than some of the more obviously ambitious films of recent years.  Where The Tree of Life (2011) and The Master (2012) reference a few big themes without really having much to say about them, the seemingly more modest Margaret manages to make compelling points about topics ranging from the solipsism of youth to the stress of living in post-9/11 New York to the relationship between art and life.  B+

 The Mill and the Cross (Lech Majewski, Poland, 92 min.) 

Lech Majewski’s wildly stylized film follows the creation of Pieter Brueghel’s 1564 painting “The Procession to Calvalry,” which depicts a huge cast of characters going about their daily business even as Christ is crucified among them.  Using a sophisticated combination of studio sets, CGI, and massive reproductions of the painting, Majewski imagines that Brueghel (potrayed here by Rutger Hauer) is actually roaming about inside the world that he is painting.  The conceit is certainly gimmicky, and the film arguably never amounts to much more than a pleasant bit of art appreciation, but the power of its images (whether taken directly from Brueghel or created by Majewski) shouldn’t be underestimated.  B-

 Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico, 113 min.)

Miss Bala boasts one of the most audacious premises of any film in recent memory, as it finds an impoverished beauty pageant contestant (Stephanie Sigman) getting caught in the middle of an inexplicable drug war.  Considering how wild the film’s plot is, and how technically impressive director Gerardo Naranjo’s many lengthy tracking shots are, Miss Bala feels oddly bland on a stylistic level.  It’s as if Naranjo couldn’t decide whether he wanted to go for surreal allegory or gritty verisimilitude, for exploitative action or harsh drama, and instead settled on a muted neutral style that makes the film feel less distinguished than it probably should.  Unfortunately the lack of a clear aesthetic prevents the film from being as gripping as it seems like it should be, though there are some strong moments scattered throughout.  C+

Project Nim (James Marsh, UK, 93 min.) 

James Marsh showed a talent for chronicling bizarre pieces of recent history with his terrific 2008 documentary Man on Wire, which detailed the events surrounding an illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers.  Project Nim, which documents a group of hippie researchers’ barely scientific attempt to raise a chimp as a human child, boasts a similarly eccentric subject but has a considerably more predictable story.  You can probably guess exactly how well the researchers’ project is going to go without knowing anything about the unusual real life story or without seeing a second of this film.  Still, the tale is swiftly edited and never less than compelling.  B-

Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, USA, 121 min.) 

Before becoming a full-time film professor, Monte Hellman made an interesting career out of directing films like Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Cockfighter (1974), which intriguingly straddle the line between grungy American-style exploitation and moody European-style art films.  Sadly, Hellman’s first feature since 1989 is a tediously self-indulgent attempt at psychodrama.  The story follows the troubled production of a noir film based on a real-life political assassination, with the director (a sleepy Tygh Runyan) becoming increasingly unable to distinguish between his film and real life.  Hellman continuously pulls the rug out from under the audience, which makes it impossible to get invested in the film as a suspenseful thriller, but because he keeps doing it in the same way (by either revealing that scenes that seem to be part of the film production are actually supposed to be happening in real life, or vice versa), Road to Nowhere also fails as an arty mind-fuck.  Hopefully this boring mess won’t be Hellman’s last testament.   D

 Tabloid (Errol Morris, USA, 87 min.)

Veteran documentarian Errol Morris tends to be at his best when dealing with eccentric “truth is stranger than fiction” stories rather than following controversial famous people or current hot-button issues.  So it’s really no surprise that the outrageous true story of a beauty queen’s possible abduction of a Mormon missionary is Morris’ most compelling work in decades.  The ambiguities surrounding the case – it seems equally likely that the missionary was a victim of sexual abuse or that he was an enthusiastic participant in a bizarre globe-trotting publicity stunt – only make the tale more interesting, and the beauty queen’s inexplicable eagerness to detail her possibly criminal acts ensure that the story remains wildly entertaining at all times.  Given how intriguing the story is, Morris’ attempts to stylize it by adopting certain techniques of tabloid journalism seem unnecessary and a bit distracting.  Still, this documentary is about as purely entertaining as any narrative film released in the past few years.  B

The Woman (Lucky McKee, USA, 101 min.) 

Considering how controversial The Woman was when it screened at Sundance, where an audience member leapt to his feet to demand that the film be banned, I expected it to at least be provocative and interesting.  Alas, this attempt at a feminist take on the “torture porn” horror subgenre is too ridiculous to be truly disturbing, and too poorly made to be taken seriously.  Director Lucky McKee (who co-wrote the script with author Jack Ketchum) deserves some credit for having more on his mind than simply filming his most grisly thoughts (and honestly, the violence here is less graphic than what is routinely seen in the popular Saw series).  The film’s premise, which involves a small-town businessman (Sean Bridgers) attempting to “civilize” a feral woman (Pollyanna McIntosh), has all sorts of dark satirical potential as a sort of rural horror version of The Wild Child (1970).  But because Bridgers is immediately exposed as a wife-abusing, child-molesting rapist, the film wastes whatever points it might have been able to make about our society’s warped concept of “normalcy” by failing to make its protagonist/villain recognizably human.  The Woman also loses points for including an incredibly stupid twist toward its end, and for featuring some of the lousiest background music in the entire history of cinema.  Some movies simply don’t deserve a wide release.   D-

2012 Milwaukee Film Festival

The fourth annual Milwaukee Film Festival boasted the largest lineup and longest overall running time that the festival has had to date, and as usual it offered a little of something for everyone and an embarrassment of riches for area cinephiles.  As usual, I imagine that I missed as much great stuff as I caught – among the most notable things I didn’t get a chance to check out were a special presentation by J. Hoberman (in town to promote his new book Film After Film and present archival screenings of David Lynch’s Inland Empire and Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil), a movie called 3,2,1…Frankie Go Boom that apparently features world’s ugliest man Ron Perlman as a transvestite, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet, Goodbye (the new film by Mohammed Rasoulof, who directed one of last year’s festival highlights, The White Meadows), documentaries about Bad Brains and The Sugarhill Gang, the much-hyped raunchy comedy Klown, the well-received Israeli suspense film Policeman, and Oscar hopeful closing-night film The Sessions.  I also imagine that there are a number of films that weren’t even on my radar that might have been excellent; the only reason that I saw Marathon Boy, my favorite film from last year’s festival, was because I was on the Features Screening Committee for the festival that year (and considering that the film hasn’t picked up any sort of critical reputation since then, it seems unlikely that I ever would have seen it otherwise).

This year I was on the Shorts Screening Committee, meaning that I came into the festival relatively cold as far as the features were concerned.  To be honest, there were only a handful of short films that made the festival that I consider to be truly memorable – with Ryan Prows’ extended action sequence Narcocorrido being the only one that stands out as a true must-see – and I wish that the festival would consolidate the best shorts into one “best in show” program like they used to rather than scattering nearly 100 shorts across eight different programs.  But there were a lot of interesting feature films this year, and I’ve written brief reviews of all of the ones that I saw in theatres below.  The only one that I saw that is not included below was an archival screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film Blackmail (1929), which was accompanied by live instrumentation from the Alloy Orchestra.  Suffice to say that it was an awesome filmgoing experience, but one that doesn’t really make sense to compare to the twenty modern-era films listed below.

11 Flowers (Wang Xiaoshuai, China, 110 min.)

Though ostensibly based on personal events from the childhood of director Wang Xiaoshuai (best known for his 2001 release Beijing Bicycle), this period drama is fairly indistinguishable from the many other Chinese films set during the Cultural Revolution.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with 11 Flowers – the cinematography is exceptional, and the performances are uniformly strong – but there is also nothing that really sets it apart from the pack.  C+

Ai Weiwei:  Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, USA, 91 min.)

First-time feature director Alison Klayman could be accused of making an overly conventional documentary about an extraordinary man, but Ai Weiwei is such a fascinating and complicated figure that this film’s aesthetics seem almost beside the point.  This thorough yet breezily entertaining portrait of China’s most prominent subversive artist manages to deal broadly with Ai Weiwei’s struggles with political authorities, his innovations as an artist, and his unconventional personal life without short-changing any of these elements.  B

 The Ambassador (Mads Brugger, Denmark, 93 min.)

Stunt documentarian Mads Brugger was last seen infiltrating a North Korean cultural festival in the underappreciated gem The Red Chapel (which was one of the highlights of the 2010 Milwaukee Film Festival).  In his latest provocation, Brugger adopts the guise of an ambassador to the Central African Republic, and gives viewers an unprecedented glimpse into the corrupt and violent world of international business.  Brugger’s hidden cameras make backstage deals involving bribery, diamond smuggling, and even murder sickeningly, grippingly transparent, and it’s frankly amazing that the director was able to escape the making of this film without getting killed himself.  Unfortunately, The Ambassador lacks The Red Chapel’s sense that Brugger is sticking up for the oppressed people who are the victims of Imperialism – he seems more interested here in exposing powerful political figures than digging into the psychology of the beleaguered Pygmies – but this is still one of the most vital documentaries of the year.  B

Beyond the Black Rainbow (Panos Cosmatos, Canada, 110 min.)

Though it is one of the few festival movies that became available on DVD before the festival started, Beyond the Black Rainbow really demands to be seen in the theatre.  A pure sensory experience, the debut feature of writer-director Panos Cosmatos relies entirely on the power of its audio-visual assault rather than its sketchy, besides-the-point plot or its thin characterizations.  While the movie occasionally feels too drawn out for its own good, and loses its way toward the end with an out of place turn into slasher movie territory, it is for the most part a genuinely spellbinding experience, a non-stop parade of gorgeously icy shot compositions set to an ominous synth score by Black Mountain’s Jeremy Schmidt.  Though Cosmatos was clearly influenced by the entire lexicon of trippy filmmakers (with Kubrick, Cronenberg, and Lynch seeming like the most obvious reference points), his slow-motion nightmare has a genuinely unnerving sensory power that is all its own.  You’ll certainly never be able to un-see the incredible flashback sequence that (apparently) involves a man dipping into a pool of oil, disintegrating and re-composing in an inexplicable field of light and smoke, and then devouring a frightened woman.  B

Citadel (Ciaran Foy, Ireland, 84 min.)

This amateurish, run-of-the-mill zombie movie should’ve gone straight to DVD.  D-

Compliance (Craig Zobel, USA, 90 min.)

This “real-life horror story” about an incredible instance of duplicity at a fast food restaurant caused quite a stir when it screened at Sundance, prompting a number of walk-outs and some filmgoers loudly accusing in-attendance writer-director Craig Zobel of misogyny.  Frankly, it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about.  Zobel clearly went out of his way to avoid making an exploitation film, and he handles the more unpleasant moments in an understated, matter-of-fact way that gives the situation dramatic impact without becoming offensive.  A prank caller (Pat Healy) convinces the restaurant’s manager (Ann Dowd) that one of her cashiers (Dreama Walker) stole from a customer, and fools the manager into conducting a degrading strip search of her employee.  Zobel’s intention was to try to make sense of this absurd yet true story, but his efforts to connect the dots are sometimes unconvincing.  The film loses credibility around the time that the manager’s fiancée shows up to deliver a spanking to the wrongly accused cashier; even if this actually happened, it’s tough to buy into the depicted buildup to the event.  The decision to actually show Healy on the other end of the extended phone call fairly early in the film also seems like a poor creative choice.  That said, Compliance is never less than compelling, with Zobel displaying a fine sense of ominous pacing and Dowd delivering a heartbreaking performance as the simultaneously victimized and bullying manager.  C+

Elena (Andrey Zvyagintsev, Russia, 109 min.)

This artsy take on the old “woman kills her spouse to gain his inheritance” story is elegantly crafted but perhaps a bit too emotionally distanced to be truly affecting.  The central relationship between the titular nurse (Nadezhda Martina) and her wealthy husband (Andrey Smirnov) is perfectly realized; the entire history of their relationship is clear without ever being completely spelled out, and their loving yet frustrated attitudes towards each other are practically written on their faces.  Elena’s reason for killing her husband (she is trying to help her dead-beat son’s family make ends meet) is also credible and plausible, as is his decision not to give away the money.  But director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s cold style (methodical paced, carefully composed shots) prevents the story from having the gut-level impact that it needs to get into the next gear.  B-

The Imposter (Bart Layton, UK, 95 min.)

An amazing true story about a Texas family that was duped by an international conman into believing that he was their missing son gets the full Errol Morris treatment in director Bart Layton’s compelling documentary debut.  It’s hard to complain too much about Layton’s blatant theft of Morris’ aesthetic when the story is this interesting and weird.  Layton uncovers some ominous and fascinating hints about why the family might have been willing to accept a French-accented, black-haired man as their American, blond-haired son, as well as a grimly entertaining side story about a folksy local detective’s attempts to find what he believes will be the dead body of the missing boy.  The film arguably ends just as things are getting really interesting, but perhaps the resulting frustration is an appropriate statement about this open-ended, truth is stranger than fiction tale.  B

The Invisible War (Kirby Dick, USA, 93 min.)

Documentarian Kirby Dick has argued passionately for transparency from the MPAA ratings board (in 2006’s This Film is Not Yet Rated) and from closeted gay politicians who vote against gay rights (in 2009’s Outrage), but he’s never had a subject as vital and disturbing as the one he deals with in The Invisible War.  Dick’s new film is about the widespread phenomenon of rape in the military, and viewers might be surprised by just how big an epidemic this is.  One of the film’s many staggering statistics reveals that female soldiers in Iraq are more likely to be raped by male colleagues than killed by enemy fire – a tragedy compounded by the fact that many of the rapists are the commanding officers who the victims are meant to report such crimes to.  Considering how damning the statistics are, and how tragic many of the personal stories told in the film are, Dick’s constant use of emotionally manipulative music seems especially obnoxious and unnecessary.  Despite this film’s shortcomings as cinema, it is a thorough and engrossing dissection of a widespread problem that is too rarely reported on.  B-

The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (Chris James Thompson, USA, 75 min.)

This might be the most laser-focused documentary I’ve ever seen.  A total of three people are interviewed for the talking heads segments, and they are pretty much exactly the people you’d want to hear talk about notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer:  the lead detective who investigated Dahmer, a forensic analyst who worked on the case, and, most fascinatingly, the killer’s former next-door neighbor.  These interviews are interspersed with the expected archival footage and staged reenactments depicting everyday moments from Dahmer’s life.  The whole thing moves by at an engrossing clip, but the reenactments, though reasonably well-executed, feel like unnecessary padding designed to bring the film to (just barely) feature length.  B-

Let the Bullets Fly (Jiang Wen, China, 132 min.)

The fact that this is currently China’s highest grossing domestic film of all time suggests that Chinese audiences have a high tolerance for frantic mugging and confusing plot twists.  Or maybe they just expected a movie titled Let the Bullets Fly starring Chow Yun Fat to be a full-blown action movie rather than a childishly goofy comedy with light action elements.  There are a handful of amusingly eccentric moments scattered throughout the film – as when a man cuts open his stomach to prove that he didn’t steal jelly from a food merchant – but for the most part this film is as dull as it is noisy and convoluted.  C

Mea Maxima Culpa:  Silence in the House of God (Alex Gibney, USA, 106 min.)

Alex Gibney is one of the most gifted documentary filmmakers working today.  Even when he is dealing with all too familiar subject matter (such as the Iraq war in his 2007 documentary Taxi to the Dark Side) or simply summarizing major news stories (as in 2005’s Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room), Gibney is usually able to deal with these events in a thorough, coherent, and entertaining matter.  The story of four deaf men’s attempt to expose the priest who sexually abused them during Catholic school should make for Gibney’s most gripping film to date, but the film has a surprising lack of focus, frequently cutting away from the central narrative to spend time giving broad, common knowledge information about the Catholic Church’s history of sexual abuse and the Vatican’s sinister unwillingness to stop the problem.  The result is a decent but fairly generic documentary that feels like it could’ve been directed by just about anybody.  C+

Mourning (Morteza Farshbaf, Iran, 85 min.)

The press materials for this film aren’t kidding when they say that first-time director Morteza Farshbaf is a disciple of Abbas Kiarostami.  Every element of Kiarostami’s distinctive aesthetic is on display here, from the many distant, gorgeously filmed shots of cars driving down roads to the occasional conversations where the camera focuses entirely on one of the people talking.  It’s an effective style, and a fine way to tell this simple story of a child searching for his parents, but hopefully Farshbaf will be able to step out of his mentor’s shadow with his next film.  B-

Old Dog (Pema Tseden, Tibet, 93 min.)

Crappy digital photography and stiff performances prevent this film from achieving the neorealist naturalism that it aspires to.  A poor family of Tibetan farmers struggle to prevent their sheep-herding mastiff from being sold to (or stolen by) Chinese traders (who will presumably sell the dog to wealthy families as a pet, though this is never really explained in the narrative).  While much of this film was a chore to sit through, I’m still glad I caught it simply for the audience reaction to the ending, which features an offscreen act of animal cruelty that provoked more walk-outs than the extended rape in Compliance, the graphic gore of V/H/S, and the pretentiousness of Beyond the Black Rainbow combined.  C-

Sacrifice (Chen Kaige, China, 132 min.)

I was afraid that Chen Kaige’s opulent period drama might be a dull prestige film, as some of the reviews seemed to suggest, but this non-musical adaptation of an ancient Chinese opera is actually a spectacularly over-the-top melodrama filled with wild plot twists, exciting battles, and numerous eccentric touches.  The plot is too complicated to adequately describe in one paragraph, but suffice to say that it involves secret identities, an ultimatum that involves the potential slaughter of 100 babies, and an assassination by mosquito.  The story may ultimately be too broad to have any real emotional or psychological depth, but it is still one of the most exciting (and exquisitely filmed) action films of the year.  B+

Starbuck (Ken Scott, Canada, 109 min.)

This French-Canadian comedy is the second annual opening night film to feature sperm donation as a major plot point.  Thankfully, it’s a lot more entertaining than last year’s forgettable Natural Selection.  A 42-year old loser (Patrick Huard) discovers that his teenage sperm donations have made him the father of 533 kids, 142 of which are suing the hospital in hopes of revealing their father’s identity.  From there the story hits the exact beats you’d expect it to - no one will be surprised when the donor is initially reluctant to make contact with his kids before eventually deciding to quietly make a difference in each of their lives – but it does so in a relatively charming way.  Writer-director Ken Scott has a good sense of comic pacing, and he also holds the film back from becoming too mawkish during its inevitable heartwarming moments.  He is also aided by a charismatic lead performance from Huard, whose presence will undoubtedly be missed in the currently in-production English-language remake starring Vince Vaughn.  C+

 Le Tableau (Jean-Francois Languionie, France, 78 min.)

This wonderfully inventive animated film is designed for children, but has more wit and allegorical power than most films intended for adults.  The story starts out inside an unfinished painting, where a group of upper-class Allduns (completely drawn characters) lord over the Halvsies (characters missing color on part of their bodies) and the impoverished Sketchies (black and white scribbles).  A star-crossed romance between a rebellious Alldun male and a Halvsie with an uncolored face leads several characters to escape from their painting in search of The Painter who will presumably bring harmony to their lives.  Their search leads the characters to inhabit the worlds of several other paintings, each of which brings a new and enchanting visual style to the film.  Gorgeously animated and endlessly entertaining, this was the highlight of this year’s festival, and one of the best films shown anywhere this year.  B+

Tales of the Night (Michel Ocelot, France, 84 min.)

In 2000, ace French animator Michel Ocelot made a feature anthology called Princes and Princesses that depicted several short fairy tales by having black silhouetted characters play against vibrantly colorful backgrounds.  Tales of the Night returns to the aesthetic of Princes and Princesses, even going so far as to include an identical framing device in which a boy, a girl, and an elderly technician insert themselves into each story.  It’s somewhat disappointing to see a creatively fertile mind like Ocelot relying so heavily on things that have worked in the past – especially on the heels of his mind-blowing Azur & Asmar, which was one of the highlights of the 2009 Milwaukee Film Festival – but there is still a lot of charm in this style, and the six tales told here are uniformly entertaining and beautiful.  B

Tchoupitoulas (Bill Ross & Turner Ross, USA, 82 min.)

This New Orleans-set quasi-documentary was perhaps the most innovative and stylistically forward-thinking film to play at the festival this year.  The film ostensibly follows the adventures of three young boys who become stranded in the French Quarter after missing the last ferry home, but that loose narrative strand is really just an excuse to present an impressionistic inner-city symphony that captures the feeling of wandering around at night, catching stray glimpses of musicians, street performers, burlesque dancers, junkies, and drag queens.  The somnambulant pace sometimes becomes tedious, especially when directors Bill and Turner Ross’ experiments aren’t quite working, but the best moments of this grungy film are practically miraculous.  It’s impossible to describe in words the way that the duo film the performance of a fire juggler/fire breather, but suffice to say that it is about as trippy as anything in the much more carefully composed Beyond the Black Rainbow.  B-

V/H/S (Adam Wingard, David Bruckner, Ti West, Glenn McQuaid, Joe Swanberg, Radio Silence, USA, 115 min.)

Horror anthologies rarely have more than one or two worthwhile segments, and the faux-documentary style of horror film became tiresome the instant the The Blair Witch Project (1999) became a sensation.  So I’m happy to report that this anthology of faux-documentary horror stories is a wonderfully fun and inventive anomaly, displaying a surprising degree of consistency and wit, as well as some of the best-ever use of the rarely effective first-person camera style.  Though some segments are stronger than others, there really isn’t a weak one in the bunch.  Ti West’s tale of two vacationing honeymooners being stalked comes the closest to failing due to having the most generic concept (and a dumb twist ending), but it also features one perfectly executed jolt that made the entire midnight audience gasp.  The best segments are David Bruckner’s tale of three horny douchebags bringing home the wrong girl, and capturing her bloody rampage through one of their hidden-camera glasses; and internet collective Radio Silence’s story about enthusiastic haunted house lovers accidentally stumbling onto a house that is actually haunted, leading to some incredibly impressive special effects that never disrupt the flow of the documentary-style footage.  Though a tad uneven by design, V/H/S is an ideal midnight movie, and one of the most purely fun horror movies in years.  B+

Understanding Auteurs: Pier Paolo Pasolini (Salo)

The “Trilogy of Life,” for all of its flaws, brought Pier Paolo Pasolini a great deal of acclaim and a relatively high amount of commercial success late in his career.  But the eternally provocative writer-director gradually grew disenchanted with the trilogy’s optimistic and hopeful view of the world as a playground of art and sex.  Around the time of the release of Arabian Nights (1974) Pasolini denounced the worldview expressed in his own trilogy in an Italian newspaper.  In an essay entitled Abjuration from “The Trilogy of Life,” Pasolini wrote:

Even the “reality” of innocent bodies has been violated, manipulated, submitted to the consumerist power:  or rather, this violence on bodies has become the most macroscopic datum of the new human epoch…Private sexual life (such as my own) has undergone both the trauma of false tolerance and of corporal degradation; and in sexual fantasies what was once pain and joy has become suicidal disappointment, formless sloth…

Therefore, I am adapting myself to the degradation, and I am accepting the unacceptable.  I am maneuvering to reorganize my life.  I am forgetting how things were before.  The beloved faces of yesterday are beginning to fade.  I am – slowly and without alternatives – confronted with the present.

This matter-of-factly hopeless and despairing viewpoint animates every frame of Pasolini’s final film, Salo (1975), a simultaneous adaptation of Dante’s Inferno and the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and set in the last days of Mussolini’s Italy.  You might expect a film with this pedigree to hold something back, to avoid graphically depicting the atrocities described in Dante and de Sade’s literary works.  But Salo holds precisely nothing back – the film is essentially an uninterrupted succession of scenes in which a group of powerful fascists torture, rape, humiliate, mutilate, and/or kill a group of very young looking men and women.  These acts occur almost uniformly in the direct center of the frame of Pasolini’s shot compositions, which, in a surprising but effective rebuke of his standard rough verite style are generally cold and static, essentially forcing the viewer to take the perspective of the fascists.  Pasolini intended for the film to be “indigestible,” and indeed it is extremely difficult to stomach; chapter headings such as “Circle of Blood” and “Circle of Shit” aren’t metaphors.  Knowing that the actors are actually eating brownies when their characters are supposed to be eating huge amounts of feces (in one of the film’s most notorious scenes) doesn’t make the scene any easier to take.  The nonstop degradation is occasionally punctuated by strikingly incongruous and weirdly sinister moments of physical comedy that have the exact opposite effect of “comic relief” and only make the film more disturbing.  There are also some creepy and haunting ambiguous moments, such as a scene where one of the fascists’ wives inexplicably jumps out of a fourth story window.

No one has ever made or will ever make a movie as horrifying and troubling as Salo.  There are a lot of films that have provocative subject matter or grisly, realistic looking violence, but it’s impossible to imagine one that stares directly into the heart of darkness to the extent that Pasolini’s final film does.  Many films are disturbing; Salo is emotionally scarring.  I can’t imagine anyone sitting through the entirety of Salo without at least once covering their eyes or getting literally sick to their stomach, and personally I can’t imagine watching the film more than once in a lifetime.  I virtually always rewatch a film that I’ve already seen if I’m going to write about it for this blog, but I had to make an exception in this case.  Though I’m basing what I write here on four-year old memories, Salo has left a mark on me that will make it hard to forget.  It’s the only film that I’ve seen that I think of as a genuinely traumatic experience.

Ironically, the very things that make Salo unwatchable are also what make it brilliant, and possibly the greatest achievement of Pasolini’s career.  The director’s strategy of distancing the viewer from the nameless victims and putting us in the cold, voyeuristic perspective of the fascist torturers initially seems offensive, but Pasolini’s moral goal (and lunatic ambition) with this film seems to be to beat the latent fascism out of each viewer.  Salo takes the desire (that we all have on some level) to have power over another human being and pushes it to its logical extreme, using Brechtian distancing effects to present our lopsided societal structure in its most base and disgusting light.  The film refuses to allow us to redeem ourselves, even through Pasolini’s most cherished social causes.  A victim who gives the Communist salute is gunned down mercilessly; another one praying to God is forced to literally eat shit.  Instead of coming to any real resolution, Salo ends mysteriously with two male victims waltzing together, leaving the prior violence hanging in the air.  It’s a relentlessly disturbing experience, and a profoundly uncompromising end to one of the cinema's most philosophically complex filmographies.

FINAL GRADES FOR PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Accattone (1961) = B

Mamma Roma (1962) = B+

La ricotta (short) (1963) = B+

The Gospel According to Matthew (1964) = A-

Hawks and Sparrows (1965) = B-

Oedipus Rex (1967) = B+

Teorema (1968) = B

Porcile (1969) = D+

Medea (1969) = C+

The Decameron (1971) = C+

The Canterbury Tales (1972) = C

Arabian Nights (1974) = B+

Salo (1975) = A-

Processing Zabriskie Point

Expectations  So far in these “Processing” posts I’ve looked at films by directors whose work I’ve had a hard time getting into despite the acclaim they’ve received (Alain Resnais and Yasujiro Ozu) and the one generally acclaimed film of a mostly disliked director (Ken Russell).  This month I’m looking at Zabriskie Point (1970), one of the least popular films by a director I do admire.  While I wouldn’t necessarily call Michelangelo Antonioni one of my favorite filmmakers, I do have an easier time appreciating his distinctive and innovative aesthetic than that of Resnais or Ozu, and there is no question that he was a better director than Russell ever was.  Antonioni’s breakthrough L’avventura (1960) might be a tough sell to today’s short attention spans, but it deserves its reputation as a groundbreaking cinematic landmark as much as contemporaneous classics like Breathless (1960) and 8 ½ (1963) do. 

That said, I can sympathize with those who are bored by Antonioni’s nontraditional emphasis on image and contemplation rather than narrative and action, and I have at time been one of those viewers.  Part of the point of L’avventura is to make its characters’ boredom and alienation palpable, which naturally has the side effect of making that great film a bit of an endurance test despite its stunning imagery, and its quasi-sequels La notte (1961) and L’eclisse (1962) sometimes feel like dull attempts to mimic L’avventura’s singular feel.  While I greatly admire the extraordinary cinematography in Antonioni’s color debut, Red Desert (1964), I have to admit that I remember practically nothing about the movie aside from a handful of very impressive images.  From the mid-‘60s to the mid-‘70s, the Italian Antonioni made several English-language films of varying quality.  Blow-Up (1966), the first of these, is as acclaimed as L’avventura is in some circles, but I find it to be perhaps the most overrated of all “classics.”  With its dated appropriation of British mod culture (which the film wants to criticize and use as a marketing hook simultaneously) and its laughable “surreal” ending, Blow-Up is almost embarrassing to watch.  The film’s plot (a photographer may or may not have accidentally caught a murder on camera) could’ve made for a solid conventional thriller – and it did when Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma made variations on it, with The Conversation (1974) and Blow Out (1981), respectively – but Antonioni’s characteristic distancing from the action is at its worst and least justifiable here. 

On the other hand, the last film of Antonioni’s English-language trilogy, The Passenger (1975), might be his best work, and perhaps the only of his films that could reasonably be called “gripping.”  Zabriskie Point is the film that came in between Blow-Up and The Passenger, and I’m hoping that it feels more like the latter than the former, even though the hippie milieu that provides the film’s setting makes me fear that it will look just as dated as Blow-Up.  Certainly the critics of 1970 weren’t kind to Zabriskie, and it doesn’t seem to have gained much of a reassessment since then.  Even the Netflix sleeve – which describes Zabriskie as “an interesting artifact of its time” – seems to be apologizing for the film’s existence.  Though Zabriskie certainly has the potential to provide a dire viewing experience, I can’t count a film by a talent as distinctive as Michelangelo Antonioni out that easily, especially since I have seen some really impressive still images from Zabriskie that suggest that it will at least be interesting to look at.  Antonioni’s films are never less than difficult, but they are almost always beautiful and occasionally intellectually stimulating, so I hold out hope that Zabriskie Point might be unfairly maligned.

 The Viewing Experience  It is immediately obvious why Zabriskie Point was universally panned upon its 1970 release.  The film’s awkward look at hippie culture probably already seemed dated in 1970.  Antonioni’s embrace of radical student politics and “free love” feels no less cynical (or out of touch) than the appropriation of hippie culture in contemporaneous exploitation films like Wild in the Streets (1968).  It doesn’t help that Zabriskie’s lead characters, a teenage drifter and a free-spirited secretary, are played by the incredibly stiff (if photogenic) nonprofessionals Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin, or that their dialogue, despite being credited to five screenwriters, mostly consists of cartoonish ‘60s slang.  The story contains potentially exciting elements – Frechette’s character is on the run after it is mistakenly assumed that he shot a police officer – but Antonioni seems perversely uninterested in developing the narrative in any meaningful way.

Then again, Antonioni has never really been a “narrative” filmmaker, and Zabriskie Point often excels when it embraces its experimental side.  The cinematography by Alfio Contini is tremendous throughout, and the movie achieves a sublime beauty whenever Antonioni ditches the dialogue and acting in favor of pure visual splendor.  A few scenes that ought to seem corny and didactic are redeemed by Antonioni’s abstract approach.  An early scene showing a commercial that represents the bourgeois ideals of some “square” advertising executives is obvious audience pandering in conception, but Antonioni’s vision of literal plastic people inhabiting a sunny middle class world has a creepy visual power in execution.  A sequence in which the main characters and a bunch of unaccounted for hippie types frolic in a gypsum-splattered desert similarly transcends its kitsch factor through the sheer beauty of the imagery.  And the final sequence, a hallucinatory series of explosions set perfectly to Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene,” is arguably the most otherworldly and mind-blowing scene in any of Antonioni’s films.  The gorgeous slow-motion footage of debris flying through the air rivals 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) for elegant trippiness, and makes sitting through the rest of this deeply flawed film worth it.

Afterthoughts  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Zabriskie Point is unfairly maligned.  The film’s many flaws - from the wooden acting of the leads to the instantly dated attempts to cash in on a ‘60s teen culture that the filmmakers clearly had only a surface understanding of – are pretty much inarguable.  While it would be reasonable to argue that Antonioni’s cinema is essentially nonnarrative and shouldn’t be evaluated in the same way that more traditional movies are, it’s still impossible to defend Zabriskie’s glaring non-commitment to the plot events that it sets up or its laughably poor (if thankfully spare) dialogue.

While I can’t say that Zabriskie Point is a particularly good film, I can say that it is nonetheless absolutely worth seeing for its amazing cinematography and its utterly spectacular conclusion.  The final sequence of explosions will undoubtedly stick with me for a long time, and it has a hallucinatory sensory power that fully transcends its vague social statement (consumer products such as Wonder Bread are among the things being blown up, apparently symbolizing the revolutionary destruction of middle class values – or something).  I suspect that Zabriskie’s potent imagery will stay with me long after its pandering social message, hazy plotting, and terrible acting have faded from memory.

Collections: Chuck Klosterman IV

Featuring the articles:  Bending Spoons with Britney Spears, Mysterious Days, Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy, Viva Morrissey!, The Amazing McNugget Diet/McDiculous, The Karl Marx of the Hardwood, That ‘70s Cruise, In the Beginning, There Was Zoso/Not a Whole Lotta Love, Band on the Couch, Garage Days Unvisited, Something Wicked This Way Comes, No More Knives, Ghost Story, Local Clairvoyants Split Over Future, The Stranger, Dude Rocks Like a Lady, Untitled Geezer Profile, The Ratt Trap/How Real is Real/The Tenth Beatle/Here’s “Johnny”, To Be Scene, or Not to Be Seen

And the essays:  Nemesis, Advancement, I Do Not Hate the Olympics, Three Stories Involving Pants, Don’t Look Back in Anger, Not Guilty, Cultural Betrayal, Monogamy, Certain Bands You Probably Like, Pirates, Robots, Super People, Television, Singularity

And the story:  You Tell Me

Chuck Klosterman made his name as a first-rate pop culture writer with the heavy metal-themed memoir Fargo Rock City (2001), but has since divided his time between writing articles for magazines such as Spin and Esquire and publishing the occasional piece of fiction like the novel Downtown Owl (2008).  Most of Klosterman’s best nonfiction pieces appear in his best-selling essay collections Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs (2003) and Eating the Dinosaur (2009).  The rest are grouped together in Chuck Klosterman IV:  A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas (2006).  Though the title is ostensibly a jokey reference to Led Zeppelin’s fourth album (technically untitled but commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV), Chuck Klosterman IV feels less like a watershed moment than it does a set of B-sides and outtakes.

That isn’t to say that IV is a waste of anybody’s time.  The tone throughout is breezy and fun, and though many of the pieces don’t transcend their origins as magazine articles, it’s hard to deny that Klosterman is better at writing about pop culture than just about anybody.  IV’s best articles tend to either emphasize Klosterman’s relative distance from the people he is supposed to be profiling or use their subjects to make a deeper and more general statement about our culture.  The opening piece about Britney Spears is a surprisingly engaging example of the former, as Klosterman is flustered by Spears’ apparently sincere obliviousness to the Madonna/whore complex that she nonetheless aggressively exploited in her rise to fame.  A eulogy for Johnny Carson is a fine example of Klosterman using his ostensible subject to speak more generally to cultural phenomena, as he somehow turns an obituary into a persuasive argument that the plethora of choices that we are offered in our society makes us “consciously happier, but unconsciously sadder.”  More often, the articles are well-written and engaging but ultimately disposable, as is the case with some fairly standard pieces about thoroughly-covered bands like Radiohead and The White Stripes.  A number of the snarkier essays are funny and will provide a great deal of amusement for music geeks (a list of the “ten most accurately rated artists in rock history” is a highlight), but they tend not to get beyond a surface level of entertainment.

The most interesting pieces in IV are not necessarily the best.  A 1995 story about Fargo’s local rock scene (written when Klosterman was 23) is amusingly earnest and clumsy in comparison to Klosterman’s current, mature style, and feels like the germ of what would ultimately develop into Fargo Rock City.  IV concludes with what would’ve been the opening 34 pages of a never-finished novella entitled You Tell Me, the fictional story of a sexually frustrated small town movie critic (written at a time when Klosterman was in real life a small town movie critic who may have also been sexually frustrated, but who probably did not have an apparently suicidal woman land on his car, as happens to the protagonist of the story).   These diversions are interesting and provide some unique glimpses into Klosterman’s writing style.  But like too much of IV, they feel inessential, suggesting that another of the book’s subtitles should’ve been For Fans Only.