Jesse's Departure As Metaphor
Now Playing: Ivy--"Ocean City Girl"
Just Deserts: The best band in Michigan has a sweet writeup in the MetroTimes. We got to hear them at the Blind Pig Thursday night in one of the tightest shows they've ever done. Afterwards it was back to the SE house for partying way too late and ending with an eerily cinematic scene at 4:30 a.m. at the corner of State and North University. My thanks to Sara, Margot and Adam for a great time.

Newsflash: On the morning of 9 January, I heard a report from CBC Radio 2 on the completion of Bush's "reshuffling" of Iraq advisors and how the plan for a troop escalation cuts against the wishes of the vast majority of Americans. While warming up some stracciatella for breakfast downstairs, I briefly turned on the TV to find Meredith Vieira grilling Ted Kennedy on the Today show over whether or not we'd "prevail" in Iraq. Prevail. Like it's a medieval tournament. That's the difference between a (relatively) independent media and a gaggle of lackeys. That's why I usually stay away from this stuff; I can get depressed enough on my own.

Brokeback Mountain (2005): There's a scene in The Blue Lagoon (which I saw in college to much hilarity at the end of a garbage-bag sledding session--make of that what you will) where Christopher Atkins and Brooke Shields are wrestling around in their unbelievably elaborate lean-to or some such and Brooke runs away with Atkins in the doorway laughing. There's then a moment of silence in which his smile fades and he understandably looks down at his cock (guarded by a conch shell or something else I'd rather not remember). Subtle. The same thought occurred to me several times while watching Brokeback, which had a lot of good things in it but which was so grand and momentous that I suspect the centrifugal forces ripped apart the cohesion of what was, essentially, a short story put on film (and those are, I suspect, harder than they look to begin with). There's a weird disjointedness to this thing that makes it more a collection of okay ingredients rather than an actual movie, a whole much less than the sum of its parts. I've had a soft spot for Michelle Williams for ages, and she's excellent as Alma, Heath Ledger's wife, her incomprehension and feelings of betrayal leading to a kind of silent explosion. I didn't enjoy Anne Hathaway nearly as much (as Jake Gyllenhaal's wife), but she did have a great moment when Ledger calls her asking for him. I've liked Ledger ever since the decidedly underrated A Knight's Tale, but found myself preferring Gyllenhal by the end (there's a great scene where he gains control of a Thanksgiving dinner from his odious father-in-law). The grand treatment mentioned earlier actually works, despite misgivings, with the spectacular scenery and the music, which relies ona pretty simple tune but which gets reinforced throughout until it's slapping me: "This is a big Oscar-worthy movie! Don't give me that look! You know you want it!" etc. etc. I usually resent that kind of thing intensely (John Barry never had to sink to that level, at least before the eighties), but it got me in the end, sure enough. Wish I knew how to quit it, really.

Prey (1977): Speaking of troubled gay relationships... take a huge house somewhere in the English countryside, meld softcore lesbian porn with an alien-infiltration story, and you've got Norman J. Warren's bizarre but not un-entertaining (in a good way, too) thriller. "Anderson" (Barry Stokes) shows up at a secluded mansion tenanted by lovers Jessica (Glory Annan) and Jo (the great Sally Faulkner)--or, as I like to call them, "Anne of Green Gables" (Jessica's Canadian, too) and "Mistress of the Lash." It quickly turns out that none of the characters are quite as they seem, to put it mildly. There's a fair deal of nudity and a little gore (thankfully, the latter is nowhere near the level I expected--I'm a huge fan of bare flesh and consensual sex in movies, but the red stuff's definitely optional). We even get an extended shot of one character nearly drowning in a pond that I found reminiscent (of all things) of Amos Gitai's grueling 2000 film Kippur, the story of a squad of Israeli medics on the Golan Heights during the 1973 war. In Kippur, I'm guessing the effect was to convey the grinding inhumanity of war and how monotonous it can become. In Prey... not sure there was a point, really, beyond getting Annan all nice and wet, but it's a nifty effect all the same. Anderson's enigmatic (his eye-level relationship with Jessica's parrot is hilariously compelling, as is a dance scene with Jo), and Jessica's extremely sweet though mildly dopey, but it's Jo who's alternately annoying and hypnotic, her domineering ways with Jessica and her strange unfolding kinship with Anderson well-communicatied by Faulkner. This is the third performance I've seen from Sally Faulkner, and it's amazing to watch a kind of generational evolution take place--first the vivacious, slightly scatterbrained photographer Isobel Watkins in the 1968 Doctor Who classic "The Invasion," then the warm, earth-mothery artiste Harriet in Jose Larraz' bewitching but appallingly flawed 1974 Vampyres, and now the suspicious, pretentious androphobe Jo. Excepting certain plot details, I can easily imagine all three dramas to be chapters in the life of a single person. All in all, it's an unexpectedly thought-provoking thriller and a refreshingly good example of British horror from the late 1970s.

Inside Man (2005): I haven't seen nearly enough Spike Lee movies--She's Gotta Have It, Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Crooklyn, Summer of Sam, and Bamboozled, basically. I'm going to try and get Do The Right Thing out of the way this month, but my housemate checked out Inside Man from the library and I figured I'd take the opportunity. It's apparently his attempt at a blockbuster, and it works great, but with odd little touches and a refreshingly offbeat pace and feel ensuring one that Michael Bay or Tony Scott aren't in charge--Terence Blanchard's jazzy score is a welcome change from the pompous cookie-cutter Hollywood music that generally punches the cards on these flicks. It almost sounds like John Barry mind-melded with Miles Davis. In many ways, Inside Man's a combination of The Negotiator and The Usual Suspects (without Kevin Spacey) with generous helpings of New York flavor. Denzel Washington and Chiwetel Ejiofor (who has a very funny moment in quoting The Godfather--again, the up-and-coming British cult faves with the Godfather quoting--see Tristram Shandy) are detectives who get called in to help another officer (Willem Dafoe) on a robbery / hostage-taking at a downtown bank carried out by Clive Owen. Jodie Foster shows up as a shady high-roller who may know more than she's saying about what's going on inside. I'm no particular friend of the auteur theory (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't) but you know a director's actually in charge on this one, from the unorthodox narrative structure (the interviews with the released hostages are frequently hilarious, giving Washington some particularly good moments--you know, as if he needed them) right down to Lee's trademark bizarro dolly shots. If I knew more Hollywood action movies would be this enjoyable, I might make it out to the theatre more often.