Untitled Weekend
Now Playing: Mirah--"Special Death"
I bit the bullet Saturday and went to the Ann Arbor Film Festival, one of the oldest and most vital in the United States. Held at the Michigan Theater, the Festival ran for nearly a week, with the briefest digital shorts standing shoulder to shoulder with prestigious, high-minded documentaries. Buying a day pass, I saw two programs of shorts and one full-length film. It was a pretty odd experience, sitting in the theater for nearly eight hours (with a dinner break) and soaking in so many cinematic visions. The effect was all the more powerful for my recent lack of attendance in theaters.

"The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello": This visually stunning little horror-adventure animated gem out of Melbourne was nominated for an Oscar earlier this month, and manages to pack all sorts of grim themes--plague, vampirism, insanity--into the half-hour story of a navigator in a weird parallel nineteenth-century world who feels he has something to prove because of a pastt tragedy. Reminiscent of Edward Gorey and 1920s animated flicks such as The Adventures of Prince Achmed in its seeming use of silhouettes (I won't even pretend to understand the technique used), it was probably the best fictional film I saw there.

"The Bread Squeezer": Twisted, Day-Glo family fare from Atlanta about an orphan who grows up with a bread fetish, yet manages to find love at the local grocery. A plot rundown really wouldn't do it justice. Tal Harris is terrific as Andrew, the blond-bobbed, emotionally stunted protagonist.

"La Vie d'Un Chien": Hilarious John Wyndham-style sci-fi story (with "apologies to Chris Marker" in the credits) presented in a photo-montage about a scientist in 1962 Paris who develops a serum replacing human chromosomes with those of dogs. Mildly ribald chaos ensues, leading to a fateful decision.

"Ride of the Mergansers": Light and silly account of hooded merganser ducklings in northern Minnesota learning to make it on their own. Music by Richard Wagner and Percy Faith. Fluffy as hell, but I love ducks; what can I say?

"Ikuma Siku": Painting in motion, creating a lyrical, haunting picture of life and dreams in icebound 1849 Labrador. Between this and Hatching, Matching and Dispatching, Newfoundland and Labrador's rapidly becoming a prime tourist destination (for me, anyway).

"A Long Struggle": Harrowing documentary by Lea Rekow (who risked her life to make it) about the Karen ethnic struggles against Burma's druglord dictatorship. I did my master's thesis on Burma's eastern frontier during the nineteenth century, and while my area of study was some distance north to "Struggle"'s setting, it was a jolt to see the scenery I'd imagined long ago while writing it, and even more so to see the disturbing footage of Karen casualties, dead and enslaved.

B.I.K.E.: The description led me to believe that this documentary, looking at the gritty interstate phenomenon of the "Black Label Bicycle Club," would be some standard left-wing rabble-rouser to get the Ann Arbor audience all fired up, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (of which I wasn't a fan). The BLBC is a loosely organized and theoretically apolitical group of bicycle enthusiasts, often operating on the margins of society, who espouse a renewable, DIY ethos that some chapters try to convert into more concrete political action (the New York chapter joined, for example, the yearly Critical Mass bike demonstrations, as well as the protests at the Republican National Convention in 2004). I was pleasantly surprised to find B.I.K.E. a gripping mix of stories--the larger tale of the BLBC subculture and the more intimate one of filmmaker Tony Howard trying to break into the club and out of the downward emotional and psychological spiral of his own life. The fondness Tony's Black Label friends in New York feel isn't shared by the national leadership in Minneapolis, and Tony, after a number of futile attempts to prove himself, forms the upstart "Happy Fuck Clown Club" even as his girlfriend dumps him after finishing rehab and he starts with the dope again. Real-life drama galore and a progressive political ethos made for a real crowd-pleaser, but it's not to be missed if you get the chance.

I seriously considered skipping Sunday night at the Old Town--I begin toiling around seven, Monday morning, and going to bed early works very well for me. Fortunately, I changed my mind, and it was an awesome show. Dabenport opened for its lead singer Misty Lyn at the Old Town Sunday night, with the same lineup for Misty's band that played at Arbor Brewing Company a couple of weeks ago. The Old Town's acoustics have been a bone of contention in the past; allegedly the oldest bar in Ann Arbor (dating in one way or another since the end of the Civil War), it hosts bands and artists in the middle of the restaurant, itself shaped like an unusually plump dumbbell tenement. The music is generally either too loud or not enough, but I didn't really notice, and it increasingly didn't matter as the night went on. Misty actually works at the Old Town, and there was a warm homefield feel to the evening. Most of the music was straight-up alt-country, with some psychedelic underpinnings courtesy of Dabenport, just the thing for a Sunday night hanging halfway between winter and spring. Misty's voice amazes me each time I hear it. Pretty solid applause all round--it got so intense at my table that the vibrations, made from our elbows while clapping, knocked my water glass onto my leg and thence onto the floor. Feeling bad about it, I picked up most of the shards, piled them into what was left of the glass, and gave it to our server, who I'm pretty sure thought I was a little "slow." Afterwards, nearly everyone went to Leopold's and had a high old time until as wee the hours could get between Sunday and Monday. After four and a half hours of sleep, I proved surprisingly active at the cafe Monday.

Not that anyone would have really been able to tell the difference.

Reality Crows-foot
Now Playing: George Frederic Handel--"Hornpipe" from Water Music Suite No. 2
The other day (perhaps the same day and place a friend of mine had her food sneezed on by an "acquaintance") I took the deposit over to the bank, as I do most every day. Due to time constraints, I had to take a delivery to a local coffeeshop in the same trip, and informed my boss thusly.

"Just make sure you keep it safe," she replied.

It was a good thing she gave me the advice. On my way back from the delivery to the bank, I ran into a clown in a top hat who was selling things out of a multi-colored box fringed with ribbon. Curious, I walked up to him and asked him what he was selling.

"Beans, man. Magic beans."

Now, I had very little personal money with me, and the thought of magic beans was really hard to resist. Who knew what kind of hijinks, scrapes, or fantastical adventures I might get into with these ensorceled legumes? It was even harder to resist once I found that he was selling magic beans labeled "X-TREME," and some that were, in fact, vanilla-raspberry flavored.

Then, though, my boss' words came back to me. "Keep it safe...keep it safe..."

I turned the guy down and continued on my way. Just think--if I hadn't been told to safeguard the bank deposit containing our gross income for the previous day, I might have blown it all on magic beans.

Of course, then I might have become King of Somewhere and not faced any consequences.

That story might as well have been true.

Trappings of Competence
Now Playing: The Decemberists--"The Legionnaire's Lament"
The title's from Josh Marshall's hilariously (in a grim sort of way) prescient article on the Bush Administration published a few years ago. He now has this interesting post where he struggles with an intellectual question I bet many of us have been facing recently. I have little hope left. Almost three more years. Think about it.

A-m-e-l-i-o-r-a-t-e
Now Playing: The Small Faces--"The Autumn Stone"
Somewhere in South Wales in the early fifth century, the young man who would become St. Patrick probably had no idea that, not only would he be canonized and have a holiday named after him, but that said holiday would enable people to start drinking in bars before eight in the morning (that was the impression I received, anyway, walking to work in the early hours). I'm not wholly exempt from blame--after a particularly wild night back in Akron at Karen and Patty's, I started on a six-pack of Bud Light around nine-thirty the next morning--but this involves large masses of people, which is a little unnerving. I remember reading some book on Irish literature and seeing a picture of Brendan Behan already a couple of sheets to the wind (looking like it, anyhow) at ten-thirty. That was weird. He looked like someone had put James "Scotty" Doohan in a vacuum cleaner and let rip. I wonder what I'll find on the streets tonight.

My Saint Patrick's Day was Wednesday, when Misty Lyn gave a tremendously soulful show at Arbor Brewing Company backed by an alarmingly talented array of musicians--Jim Roll, Matt Jones, Colette Alexander, Carol Gray, and Greg McIntosh, with Aaron Dresner of Dabenport handling the opening set with Matt. The show was organized by Michigan PeaceWorks, which put together a number of these shows to get the word out on various anti-war happenings around town. Wednesday night the subject of discussion was Guantanamo Bay and the morally and intellectually bankrupt foreign policy it represents. Functions like these help to keep me stoked about the possibilities of change. Personally I think its too late to arrest all sorts of national decline (economic and political) and the international decline of the global environment (as far as it's amenable to humans, anyway--the cockroaches don't seem to mind), but we might as well give it a whirl, right? With such thoughts in my mind, it was still fun hanging out and chatting (I don't remember a great deal of what I said--I can, but it hurts). Austin Powers lines, music trivia, a firsthand account of National Guard service back in the home state during Katrina, an appeal to people of goodwill to write their legislators... it was all good fun. There should be more nights like that.

Slice of Stasis
Now Playing: Saint Etienne--"Kiss And Make Up"
The "Michigan Year," so gorgeously elegized by Alex Robins, has reached the stage where it jerks back and forth between (on the one hand) temperate, sun-drenched glory, not a cloud in the sky, and (on the other) heavens the color of scrubbed-to-the-bone Brillo, with Louhi, the Crone of the North, belching (or worse) freezing wind and sleet from every direction. Yesterday was primarily the latter, but it dissipated towards the end of the evening, letting the moon loose against the clashing canvas of cloud and night sky. I saw the moon come up in the "bay windows" of my residence. I don't know if they're actually "bay windows"--I don't think the house I presently inhabit is really grand enough for bay windows, but it is pretty old. Probably late Victorian, stripped and gutted inside and out to equip it for students and the working poor. Forsaking The Rick Mercer Report on CBC, I rushed outside to get a better look. The weather had grown milder, which meant that my parts were in no danger of freezing. I stayed to watch the moon for about a minute, my socks soaking up the cold from the sidewalk along Geddes Avenue, and felt dissatisfied. I ran back in the house, up the stairs two at a time, and tried to get a gander from my bedroom window (which is definitely not a bay window). My window faces the north, and it was still pretty early. Opening the window, I stretched three-quarters of me outside and watched the moon rise over the house next door for a couple of minutes. If my meager spiritual instincts took a more primeval turn, I'd certainly be a moon-worshipper. You can see the moon; you can rarely see the sun without a tiny bit of pain. The urges which compelled me to share this half-hour have now subsided.

Learn To Work The Saxophone
Now Playing: Rocket From The Tombs--"Amphetamine"
My almost complete ignorance of last year's Oscar-nominated films convinced me to return to the theatre. Whorishly enlisting in the Borders Rewards savings card program, I discovered that doing so also entitled me to a free ticket Tuesday evenings at the Michigan Theater (for a limited time, natch). I prised myself loose from my weekly routine and went to see Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch (2004), the latest in the mass of neo-vampire flicks that show no sign of abating. Based on a series of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko, Night Watch tells of conflicts among "The Others," supernatural beings divided into "light" and "dark." It looks great and benefits (at least for this American viewer) from its setting in modern-day Moscow. The locations, the look, and some of the performances (especially lead Konstantin Khabensky as Anton, the mopey, sweater-vested clod who becomes a troubled vampire hunter) partially compensate for a rather derivative story--light against dark, prophecies, a "Chosen One", etc. It doesn't help that a Buffy clip is shown in one scene. The ending's pretty downbeat and limp, but if they're filming it as part of a trilogy... well, that's still not much of an excuse. For Russian cinema, I much preferred Sadko (1953), Aleksandr Ptushko's fantasy classic shown for Cinema Guild last week. It's a little more refreshing these days to watch a poor medieval Novgorod merchant-warrior search for the "Bird of Happiness" in gorgeous color shots and snappy musical numbers (in the process racing a seahorse, surfing--perhaps inadvertently--running afoul of city elders, a devious maharaja, and the King of the Sea, whose pet catfish and giant octopus looooove to dance). Good stuff, and great for nightmares!

Wednesday night I went to volunteer at Planned Parenthood, where I hung with Jess, Ingrid and Angela, and we all shared our indignation at the recent lunacy in South Dakota. There's always more to do, and things aren't getting any better. Tuesday I hope to plow through the rest of cataloging the WRAP library. I'm trying to keep active; Ann Arbor's pretty liberal on the surface, but it's very complacent, and some of the class implications of how society works escape many people (the modern-day difference, I think, between "liberalism" and "progressivism").

Saturday, I saw Annie and Actual Birds delvier an enjoyable little set at Crazy Wisdom. Dustin gave us "Crooked Smile" and some other songs, a couple of which, such as "Art and Commerce" hint at the political divide I mentioned earlier. There need to be more of these: songs that seek change through subtlety and understanding, not rote preaching. Annie gets better and better; "Jerk" is simply wonderful, and the melodies are gorgeous. We even got a couple of covers--one of Misty's and one of Tim Monger's--which was a nice bonus. Even with all that, though, I was a little depressed. It was probably my fault for watching Hearts of Darkness and Hotel Terminus the day and night before.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991) came out around the same time I first saw Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). It was an obvious thing to compare the two, a comparison the movie doesn't have to go far to shove down one's throat. Hearts revolves around the film diary kept by Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, during filming in the Philippines during the late 1970s, which chronicled the ups and downs of the notoriously tortuous production. Just as Apocalypse Now allegedly "was" Vietnam, as Coppola put it in his Cannes interview, Hearts is similarly linked: the material overkill, the drugs, the delusions of grandeur, the increasing insanity. In the end, it's a weirdly inspiring story, vividly demonstrating the pitfalls of going too far for art. Coppola and Co. pulled back just before the brink, but not before getting a good long look into the darkness.

Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) is a different kind of animal, but is also a study in extremism. Klaus Barbie (1913-91) was an SS officer and head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, during the Second World War, eventually responsible for the deaths, torture, or deportation of almost 30,000 people. During the immediate postwar period, he was recruited as an intelligence asset by the US in the ruins of Germany, collecting information from his former comrades on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Eventually fleeing to Peru and Bolivia, he became involved in local politics and drug trafficking. Hunted by the French government and Nazi-hunters like Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld, he was returned to France in the 1980s and came to trial at the same time the film was made. In 1987, he was convicted to life imprisonment and died in 1991. There's some interesting information here about the trial, unavailable for the film. Even at four and a half hours long, it never flags. Filmmaker Marcel Ophuls interviews former soldiers, civilians, and spies from France, Germany, the US, Bolivia, and Peru, painting a mesmerizing picture of life during the war and after. The ending, when one of the French Jewish deportees almost accidentally confronts a ghost from her past, is a knockout. The great strength of the movie is how it emphasizes the conflicts between the allies during the war, (challenging the simplistic historical narrative of the Second World War that, though it still exists today, was a hell of a lot more powerful back in the 1980s), and demonstrating how the issues that brought about the war linger on into the present day. Interviews with 1960s luminaries like Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Regis Debray, and Gunter Grass bring the notion to the fore--the Nazis are gone, but the root causes that brought them to power still remain to resist. As Debray observes of Barbie's bizarre, sinister adventures in Bolivia during the 1960s and 1970s (providing the government with his services in state repression and mixing with right-wing German mercenaries), the fact that governments of the present would hire people like Barbie show that the root causes of the war continue. There's always more to do, and things aren't getting any better.

Glamorpusses
Now Playing: Darius Milhaud--"Suite Provencale"
Believe it or not, I'm glad I watched the Oscars. I wasn't particularly enthused over any of the awards, except for Philip Seymour Hoffman's win; I love that guy. It was more for the spectacle itself, and what it says about the people who try and rule our imaginations. Now, while I think the Oscars have serious issues, it's hard to truly despise a ceremony whose high points are 36 Mafia, Itzhak Perlman, and a brief shot of Peter Sallis sitting behind Tim Burton. In what's probably a personal record, I only saw one of the movies nominated for an award over the past year, and that was March of the Penguins. Jon Stewart proved shockingly flat as a host; I haven't seen The Daily Show for over two years, but I've never thought he'd lose any of the funny (and therefore I blame the occasion). Ludacris and a few others aside, the introductory speeches were cowed and lame, like all the life had gone out of the ceremony. It was painful watching Lauren Bacall wrestle with that film noir tribute, but overall there was a healthy sense of schadenfreude about the whole thing. The film industry is (or believes itself to be) in trouble, and it was fun to see the results. My favorite moment was the speech from the President of the Academy (whoever he is). While not up to the standard of the RIAA president (whoever he was) who delivered that rousing "hunt-and-destroy" speech at the Grammies a few years back regarding MP3 downloads, it was still pretty stirring stuff. If it weren't for him, I would have gone wholly ignorant of the crime I've perpetrated on the American film community, and my own aesthetic sensibilities by not making damn certain I caught visionary masterpieces like Yours, Mine, and Ours, Cheaper By The Dozen 2, and In the Mix in the only way to truly appreciate them--on the big screen (TM)!! I'll have to have a good long think; where did I first go wrong?

Actually, In the Mix looks pretty entertaining.

It's The Arts
Now Playing: The Velvet Underground--"What Goes On" (live)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1925): Carl Theodor Dreyer's masterpiece seemed to last less than its ostensible running time of two hours. A straight retelling of the last days Joan (who'd been canonized only five years before) spent on earth, it seems a little creaky in places, and I was worried that it would be one of those "good-for-you" movies that make me wish I'd the ninety minutes or however long back. Fortunately, Dreyer manages to leaven the high moral tone with his actors, whose remarkable faces in closeup would have credited the weirdest spaghetti westerns. Chief among them, of course, is star Renee Falconetti, with unspeakably luminous eyes set in a face that alternately resembles Isabella Rossellini and Dave Foley.

The Canterbury Tales (1971): Good times, good times. Like many, I read this in high school, and it was funny to think of the haute-couture gloss given it (and the relentless emphasis on symbolism that made me despise Hemingway and almost ruined Mark Twain) and then watch this and remember that the whole thing fundamentally consists of smutty jokes, peole farting and pissing on each other (Jenny Runacre and Robin Askwith*, respectively), bed-hopping and pustules. All this is fine by me, and I'm coming to the conclusion that few people make better movies about this sort of thing than Pier Paolo Pasolini (it helps that Tonino Colli's his cinematographer, but still). Pasolini was apparently a huge visual influence on Terry Gilliam, and it shows in the gritty, sometimes showy realism of the different scenes. I could have done without the stupid Chaplin references, courtesy of Ninetto Davoli, Oedipus' servant from Edipo Re (Oedipus himself, Franco Citti, also shows up as a mysterious rent collector). Given these echoes from earlier Pasolini films, I briefly hoped that Silvana Magnano and Maria Callas would show up in half-clad, unbilled cameos, but I apparently can't have everything. There's a languid feel to The Canterbury Tales that makes me relax, as if it doesn't matter how long it lasts. It's fun watching all these sordid shenanigans, all the acne-scarred youth fucking their way across Merrie Olde England, as well as noticing various character actors pop up in minor roles (Nicholas Smith as a monk, Phil Davis as a catamite, Tom Baker stripping). The scenery's gorgeous, by the way--apparently Pasolini (who plays Geoffrey Chaucer) shot much of it in the West Country and the Cotswolds, and it's beautiful. I could definitely watch this again.

Canada at the Blind Pig: I saw them last night, with the Dollfaces and the High-Strung. I hadn't heard the latter, and left in the middle of their second song, feelnig distinctly uninspired (there was also a lame chorus, which I--fortunately?--can't remember right now). The Dollfaces were marginally better than I remember them--large beat and small lyric, for the most part, with many songs simply sounding the same, but there were a couple that were rather beautiful melodically, which means I'll probably have to go to one more show before I decide I've had enough. Canada's "Hexenhaus" opens with cellist Eileen playing the Dies Irae, which is awesome (hey, it worked for Berlioz). Their set was an agreeable batch of songs that benefited strongly from the relatively unusual instrumentation; again, the cello, like the accordion, lends music an automatic baseline of cool. Towards the end, though, I found myself feeling melancholy. The music made me think of quirky, artistic young lovers, separated somehow and finding themselves casting eatch other hateful yet longing looks at underground art shows and music gigs like, well, Canada at the Blind Pig. Fortunately, one play of Syd Barrett's "Octopus" (which I've decided is the song that really says, "me") was enough to get me out of the mood. I think they're better live than on their EP, but I don't think I regret buying it. Incidentally, I read all of the Sindbad stories from Burton's translation of The Arabian Nights during the show. He definitely didn't go to Finland, so it'll be interesting to see how Alexei Ptushko explains it all away.

Canada (and its music):
1. I somehow ended up awake at one-thirty Saturday morning (and remained so for nearly the next twenty-four hours). I read Jan Morris' last book of essays, The World(I think Morris has become my favorite living writer) and listened to "Weekender" on the CBC. I found a treat: they played all of Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations, with some outtakes featuring snippets of Glenn at his weirdest. The guy's fantastic; I never really paid attention to actual styles of piano before, but there's a power and at the same time a serenity you can sense in the way he handles the music. As I listened and read, the sun slowly came up in the crisp, clear sky over Forest Hill graveyard past Geddes, and it was one of those transcendent moments that I know will never come again.
2. Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, whenever I see him being interviewed on TV, always strikes me as a very thoughtful and articulate character. Why, then, does his music make me want to strangle him? Funny, that.

* Askwith's scene might be considered by some as a physical manifestation of his entire career. I haven't seen enough of his movies to judge for myself, but the controversy exists. I must say, though, after watching him literally waggle his cock over innocent tavern-goers, that I wish he'd been cast as "Ass #2" in "The Miller's Tale", a role some might say he was born to play.

Keep The Faith, Strannix
Now Playing: Wilco--"Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again)"
Read it and marvel. My thanks to Mr. Paul Mudie of Edinburgh, Scotland, for directing my attention there.

That's How We All Died That Night
Now Playing: Sing-Sing--"Emigre"
Local supergroup Descent of the Holy Ghost Church is no more. I had the privilege of attending their final show last Saturday, amidst a weekend replete with good music. Already jazzed by the Halfass benefit show, featuring Patrick Elkins (weird and strident, who can be an acquired taste but is, as Joseph Cotten said of Orson Welles, "never, ever dull"), Kelly Caldwell (see here and there), and the Dollfaces (rather flat Detroit r'n'r--apparently the Von Bondies were supposed to show at some point but didn't), in a ramshackle mini-palace on North Division reminiscent of the house in Fight Club, I found myself in a very agreeable mood for Saturday night's show. There's a curious and unexpected transcendence to be found in listening to a lovely, dulcet female voice trilling her exquisite "Daffodils" while crammed against the house fridge with a forty of Budweiser held aloft in order to facilitate the movement of passersby--I always seem to be in the way. There was more room at the Blind Pig.

Descent included two great solo performers--Chris Bathgate (guitar) and Matt Jones (drums)--another solo performer--Jansen Swy (keyboard; who pleasantly surprised me at an earlier show but whose stuff I didn't hear too much)--as well as the masterful Ross Huff on trumpet and the unstoppably vivacious Carol Gray on violin. That night they added Louis Dickinson and some other fellow whose name I didn't catch. Whether it was my general position in the audience of each of their shows, or previous expectations based on the languid, introspective styles of Chris and Matt's solo shows, I always expected them to sound different. The sound, which I thought finally, truly came together that night in time to convince me that they were much more than the sum of their parts, was an agreeably messy melange of indie-folk with strong jazz and funk undercurrents (the latter, I think, mainly due to Jansen and Ross) that I wish had been recorded somehow. The audience, primed by the promising sounds of the Dardanelles (what a great name for a band) got into the act, singing along like it was a Kelly Caldwell show and cheering wildly at the end (although failing to get an encore). The band was crisply turned out in nice suits, with Carol completely rocking a wedding dress--it was one of the great shows, up there with the Madison House and Bad Idea finales, or the No Fun Records showcase of 2004. Dithering for a bit afterwards while watching Misty "pony" across the empty floor of the Blind Pig (and failing a half-cocked flamenco myself), I decided to attend the afterparty, where we all danced, drank, and sang ("Like A Prayer" and "The Star-Spangled Banner" among others) into the wee hours, governed by the impish whims of a temperamental iPod. Many, many thanks, DHGC and everyone who helped to make the weekend so enjoyable.

I like to think I'm a pretty tough hombre when it comes to pop culture. There's a clean fun to be had out of truly wrongheaded moments that touches the spiritual. Having said that, I was at a commercial break in the Olympics a few nights ago when I flipped channels for the hell of it. I stopped at a gleaming villainous lair with an oily miscreant in a white robe threatening two captive females. What seemed like an eternity passed before I realized that the females were Hilary Duff and Law and Order's Angie Harmon. The shock of not wanting to believe that the villain was Ian McShane (oh, sure, he's been in crap before, but still...) nearly sent me out into the snow, screaming in preparation for "accidentally" stumbling and running my head into the sidewalk pavement. Oh, the movie was Agent Cody Banks, if anyone was curious. It's all right now, though; I'm cool.

"Curse of the Shepherd House" was better. Screened for the Michigan Theater's Cinema Slam last night, it featured closing music by local country-folkies Dabenport and a screenplay by Bang! impresario Jason Gibner. Plot: Mild-mannered fellow moves into a nicely-colored house, aided by a chirpily untrustworthy realtor. Bizarre visions and manifestations ensue, leading to... well, something involving blood that results in the house changing hands again at the end. For ten minutes, there was a good deal of meat. The beginning and end gave off that "sun-drenched" vibe that worked so well for Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and Let's Scare Jessica To Death. The vision scenes were very well-done and the climax had a rough feel that made things a little scarier than if it had been done in a more polished manner. All in all, it was better than I expected--a worthy reason to venture into the theater again after half a year (the ticket being only five bucks helped a good deal, too). The entire program was actually pretty strong. There were some dopey two-to-three-minuters, "Phone Physical," a highly amusing short that wouldn't have been out of place as a Kids In The Hall sketch, and two outstanding works: "Tahara" featured an Arab-American woman's grisly memories of her circumcision (better known as female genital mutilation) and its consequences for her own daughter, and "The Act" starred the great Debra Jo Rupp (Kitty Foreman of That 70s Show)as a standup comedienne with a secret. Now I actually want to go to Cinema Slam again--wasn't expecting that either.