Watching an old "Austin City Limits" ep with performances by Raphael Saadiq and Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears.

Dave Kehr's When Movies Mattered

Reading this complilation of Kehr's reviews, mostly from his tenure as film critic at the Chicago Reader (from 1974-1985).

Images

. . . from Lodge Kerrigan's Clean, Shaven

My 2010 NBA All-Star Ballot

East


G - Rajon Rondo
G - Dwayne Wade
C- Dwight Howard
F – Lebron James
F- Chris Bosh

West

G – Chris Paul
G – Kobe Bryant
C – Marc Gasol
F – Kevin Durant
F – Tim Duncan
 
This would offer some great match-ups: Wade vs. Kobe, Lebron vs. Kevin Durant, Tim Duncan vs. Chris Bosh. I give the West a slight edge overall. Vote right now while you still can.

Robin Wood (1931-2009)

The excellent film critic Robin Wood died a few days ago. He wrote a number of outstanding and important books, including the two I am most familiar with: his first, a book about Hitchcock's films originally published in 1965, and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan, originally published in 1986. David Bordwell has written an appreciation of Wood's work here.

Elliott Smith albums to be re-released on Kill Rock Stars ( + free download of a previously unreleased song)

Pacific Northwest record label Kill Rock Stars has announced that they have acquired the rights to two of the late Elliot Smith's albums, Roman Candle and From a Basement on the Hill. With these additions, Kill Rock Stars' catalog now includes all of Smith albums except the two albums--XO (1998) and Figure 8 (2000)--Smith recorded during a brief stint on the now-defunct Dreamworks Records. According to Kill Rock Stars' website, Roman Candle (originally released on Cavity Search in 1994) has been remastered for the new release. The album will also be released available on vinyl for the first time. Release date for both albums will be April 6th, 2010,

To celebrate, the Smith albums currently available on KRS--Elliott Smith, Either/Or, and New Moon--are on sale on their website and via iTunes. Additionally, they are offering a previously unreleased Smith recording, "Cecilia/Amanda," as a free download.

Some thoughts on CD Remastering

Remastered music: making new from old?

(Posted using ShareThis)

I came across this article via a link from a friend's blog. It's a sort of intro to the pros and cons of remastering:

"Remastering is a valid, yet often overused concept. Record labels have found remastering to be a way to get loyal fans to buy their favorite albums again. In many cases, the music is just dusted off, treated with some noise reduction, and slapped on new CDs—perhaps with a few bonus tracks"

"Remastering raises some philosophical questions, though. When listeners are used to a certain sound over a long period—such as several decades—any remastering sounds peculiar."

Something the author doesn't mention--the so-called "loudness war":

Kissed at Wal-Mart

As you may already be aware, Kiss released their 19th studio album, Sonic Boom—there first in more than a decade (their previous record, the somewhat ill-conceived “reunion” of the band's original line-up Psycho Circus, was released way back in 1998)--is being sold in the U.S. exclusively through Wal-Mart (I'm generally not a fan of the concept of exclusive albums, but that's a topic for another day). It's a pretty good record, but more interesting to me has been the mega-retailers strategy to rouse additional interest in the album by making the heart of the band's back catalog—remastered version of the studio albums the band recorded for Casablanca Records between 1974-1977—available for either $5.00 or $7.00 depending on title. I've been a Kiss fan since I first heard them on the radio as a youngster during that period during which they were at the height of their popularity, but I'd somehow never bought these albums on CD. In the past few months, I've purchased Kiss (1974), Hotter than Hell (1974), Dressed to Kill (1975), Destroyer (1976), Rock and Roll Over (1976), and Love Gun (1977).

Invictus

I'm hoping to get out and see Clint Eastwood's new film, Invictus, some time before Christmas.

Christgau on the new Nirvana album

Robert Christgau on Nirvana's Live at Reading (released November 3rd), an official release of the band's oft-bootlegged performance headlining the 1992 Reading Festival:

Nirvana's outtakes retain more jam than most, in part because they've been doled out so sparingly. Even the detritus-happy three- CD/one-DVD "With the Lights Out" box is not only fascinating but pleasurable. A side effect of this restraint is that, except for the subdued and hence one-of-a-kind "MTV Unplugged," this is the band's very first concert album -- one show beginning to end rather than the hither-and-yon performances unified into "From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah" in 1996. Half these 24 songs aren't on that record anyway, but even if most of them were, the sustained mood and energy flow would be something new and precious. The arrangements offer few surprises, though check the guitar intro to "Smells Like Teen Spirit"; the Mudhoney cover and unfinalized "D-7" at the end are there to tamp the crowd down a little. So what? This one proceeds directly to the canon.

1st trailer for Iron Man 2

Iron Man 2 hits theaters on May 7, 2010, followed by Thor on May 20, 2011 and The First Avenger: Captain America on July 22, 2011, all leading up to The Avengers (which will unite the title characters of the other films in a single film) on May 4, 2012.

Trailers from the Home Theater II: The House of the Devil

Our dog has an injured leg and my wife is not feeling well, so the three of us are curled up in bed watching The House of Devil.

Michael Atkinson's Top 50 films of the decade

Over at Zero for Conduct, Michael Atkinson has compiled a list of the best films of the '00s--"my decade-best list, the Top 50, in order because it's not fun any other way, as it’s being fed into the exanding universe of film critic best-of stats":


1. La Commune (Paris, 1871) (Peter Watkins, France)
2. What Time Is It There? (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan)
4. Adaptation (Spike Jonze/Charlie Kaufman, US)
3. Werckmeister Harmonies (Bela Tarr, Hungary)
5. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry/Charlie Kaufman, US)
7. Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke, France)
8. Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)
9. Cache (Michael Haneke, France)
10. Inland Empire (David Lynch, US
11. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, US)
12. Elephant (Gus Van Sant, US)
13. Children of Men (Alphonse Cuaron, US/GB)
14. Oasis (Lee Chang-dong, Korea)
15. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weersethakul, Thailand)
16. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, US)
17. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
18. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, Taiwan)
19. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, Hong Kong)
20. Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson, Sweden)
21. Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France)
22. The Weeping Meadow (Theo Angelopoulos, Greece)
23. Safe Conduct (Bertrand Tavernier, France)
24. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, US)
25. Platform (Jia Zhangke, China)
26. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, US)
27. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, US)
28. 4 (Ilya Khrjanovsky, Russia)
29. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, Canada)
30. The Day I Became a Woman (Marziyeh Meshkini, Iran)
31. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, France)
32. Wordly Desires (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand)
33. Dans Ma Peau (Marina de Van, France)
34. United 93 (Paul Greengrass, US)
35. Ballast (Lance Hammer, US
36. Le Fils (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium)
37. Wendy & Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, US)
38. Keane (Lodge Kerrigan, US)
39. The World (Jia Zhangke, China)
40. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, US)
41. Turtles Can Fly (Bahman Ghobadi, Iran/Iraq/Kurdistan
42. Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico)
43. Once (John Carney, Ireland)
44. Still Life (Jia Zhangke, China)
45. Monday Morning (Otar Iosseliani, France)
46. The Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel, Argentina)
47. The Last Train (Alexei German Jr., Russia)
48. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel)
49. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, US)
50. The Mist in the Palm Trees (Carlos Molinaro & Lola Salvador, Spain)

It's a very astute list, I think, though I wouldn't rank Inglorious Basterds, Brokeback Mountain, or Adaptation as highly as does Atkinson.

(I've put the ones that I've a chance to see in red, most of the rest are in my Netflix queue)

Trailers from the Home Theater: John Woo's Red Cliff and Gregor Jordan's The Informers

This afternoon I'm watching Red Cliff, directed by the Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo, an outstanding director of action melodramas who was never wholly successful at translating his grand style into the idiom of present-day Hollywood. Red Cliff is Woo's first HK film since 1992's masterful Hard Boiled, and is being hailed as a return to form.



Last night I watched the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis' 1994 collection of linked short stories The Informers. Like most of Ellis' work (American Psycho being a notable exception), this book made a not-so-good film. With the exception of relatively small roles by Mickey Rourke and the late Brad Renfro, it's a pretty lifeless film.

Idle Thoughts

Check out the the official promo photos for  former American Idol contestant Katherine McPhee. She's gone platinum blonde:

The new album (to be titled Unbroken, apparently) was to be released in October 2009, but like her first record, it was delayed, pushed back due to "scheduling conflicts," and is now due out January 5th, 2010. She got dumped by he original label, RCA, due to underwhelming sales of he eponymous debut (I heard it not long after it was released in 2007, but honestly have virtually no recollection of what it actually sounded like), and is now signed to Verve Forecast Records. The delay doesn't seem to bode well for McPhee's career.

Reading List—December 2009

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music—Greg Kot

The Book of Basketball—Bill Simmons

Eating the Dinosaur—Chuck Klosterman

How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll: An Alternative History of American Popular Music—Elijah Wald

The Beatles: The Biography—Bob Spitz

''Truly, My Satan, thou art but a Dunce"

Earlier this week I watched Lars Von Trier's Antichrist on pay-per-view television. Very disappointing. Sitting down to watch it, I was aware that it had received generally negative reviews, though I hadn't actually read any of these reviews. I admire some of Von Trier's earlier films—The Element of Crime, Europa, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark—but I've found his recent films increasingly numb and treadless, rote quasi-provocations, and his latest is no exception. For all it's sex-and-guilt violence, and despite some memorable imagery (see above image), Antichrist is not nearly the outrageous work it was billed as being, though it's plenty dumb at times . . . and occasionally downright laughable.

Recent acquisitions:

Middle Cyclone--Neko Case
Off Ground-Paul McCartney
Lost Dogs--Pearl Jam
Play: The Guitar Album--Brad Paisley
Electric Arguments--The Fireman
Living Things--Matthew Sweet
Get Happy!!--Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Please Do Not Disturb--Juliana Hatfield
American Saturday Night--Brad Paisley
Love Gun--Kiss
Psycho Circus--Kiss
Destroyer--Kiss
A Thousand Leaves--Sonic Youth
Riot Act--Pearl Jam
Democracy--Killing Joke
The Believer--Rhett Miller
In Rainbows--Radiohead
OK Computer--Radiohead
Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star--Sonic Youth
Funeral--Arcade Fire
Neon Bible--Arcade Fire
Magical Mystery Tour--The Beatles

Pardon Our Dust

I've been away for a while again--busy with the kids, etc--so I decide it was time to freshen up the look of things again. Hope you like it.

This month's reading list

Michael Sragow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master
Emanuel Levy's Vincente Minnelli: Hollywood's Dark Dreamer
Kevin Browlow's Hollywood: The Pioneers
Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

This week I'm busy trying to find time to watch:

Solaris
Farewell, My Concubine
W.

More bad news for American film culture--one of the great independent film distributors, New Yorker Films, is going out of business:

Sátántangó

I'm a few hours into Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr's 450-minute-long masterpiece Sátántangó. It's a fascinating film, but one that is a bit of a feat of endurance to get through, so I'm trying to muster the concentration to do so. I anticipate having quite a bit to say about this film in the near future. Stay tuned.

What I've been watching

Here's what I've been watching lately:

The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein
Murder!
Lord Love a Duck
The Contract
The Tall Men
Semi Pro
Crossfire
The Walker
The Trouble With Harry
Meet Me in St. Louis

For the record, I particularly recommend Mad Songs and Lord Love a Duck.

The Incredible Hulk

I recently had the chance (after much delay) to get out to my local cinema and see The Incredible Hulk. Some thoughts:

A few years ago Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins was more of an antidote to a series of earlier Batman films—three directed by Tim Burton followed by two directed by Joel Schmacher—than it was a sequel to these earlier films in the usual sense. Similarly, Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk reboots the Hulk franchise following the (in some respects) failed experiment of director Ang Lee’s 2003 film The Hulk (a film I recently saw a second time at Ebertfest 2008).
Lee’s film, which I’m here proposing be immediately retitled Bruce Banner, is dramacentric, focusing on two tragic relationships—Banner’s (Eric Bana) love for Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly) and the return of Banner’s estranged father (Nick Nolte)—creating a weirdly skewed quasi-Oedipal love triangle that steals away too much screen time from the shoulda-been star of the show, the Hulk.

Leterrier’s action-drunk revision puts its baroquely muscled and veined CGI behemoth front and center (and for good measure tosses in Hulk nemesis the Abomination at no extra charge), while painting the Banner-Betty Ross (portrayed here by Edward Norton and Liv Tyler) romance in much broader strokes. Between the rock’em-sock’em, the film manages to shoehorn in an origin for Hulk archenemy The Leader, a Lou as well as do so dirty work setting up future Marvel franchises The Avengers, Nick Fury/S.H.I.E.L.D., and Captain America.

All points considered, as I’ve already eluded to above, I slightly prefer The Incredible Hulk to Lee’s earlier film, primarily because I feel that Leterrier takes the comic book character more seriously than did Lee, who seems to me to have been more interested in Bruce Banner than he ever was in the Hulk. At the same time, I prefer Norton’s portrayal of Banner to Bana’s. Granted, Tyler may not be quite as accomplished a dramatic actress as Connelly, but I actually found her lighter touch welcome in the later film. The villains in both films are the really weakness of each film, never really much more than stereotypical “bad guys” (and the latter film’s climatic slugfest is irksomely similar to the final battle in Iron Man, which had been released just weeks earlier). Looking back on the comic book adaptations of 2008, The Incredible Hulk won’t be remembered as the best (that honor will likely go to The Dark Knight), nor probably even the second or third best (Iron Man and Hellboy II, order depending on your tastes), but it’s a good solid entry at #4.

A Night at the Home Theater

Tonight, after much delay (long story short--Netflix shipped me the DVD back in December and I'm just gettting around to watching it now), I finally am watching The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein.

Wanna Be My Netflix Friend?

If you would like to be Netflix Friends, go here.

New Layout!

How you like me now?

Library of Congress National Film Registry

Here's a complete list of all the films selected to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress:

http://www.loc.gov/film/titles.html

It's somewhat disappointing how similar (if more expansive) this list is to the list compiled by the American Film Institute several years ago.

Frank Miller and the Man Without Fear

I am currently about half way through Frank Miller’s early-80’s stint as writer/artist on Daredevil (specifically, Daredevil #168-182, collected in Daredevil Visionaries—Frank Miller Vol. 2. At the time these issues were originally published, I was ten or eleven years old, and primarily a Spider-Man fan, so I wasn’t really reading Daredevil at the time. As a result, I wasn’t really aware of Miller as a superstar writer/artist until his later work on Ronin (1983) and Batman: The Dark Night Returns (1986) for DC a few years later. And of course Miller went on to write/draw Sin City and 300 for Dark Horse Comics in the ‘90s.

Years later, with the title by then in the hands of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Michael Lark, I found myself reading Daredevil on a regular basis. While keeping up with their run on the book, I also went back to a critical point in Daredevil history—the title was cancelled and rebooted under the Marvel Knights imprint in 1998 by writer Kevin Smith and artist Joe Quesada. I went on to catch up with the narrative in trade paperback as it passed through the hands of David Mack, Brian Michael Bendis, Bob Gale, then Bendis once again, until finally arriving back at the point at which (beginning with issue #82) Brubaker and Lark took over.

It’s well known, of course, that most of the best work on the title during this period, both in terms of writing and artwork, can be traced back to Miller’s groundbreaking work on Daredevil in the 1980s (writer/artist teams Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark provided particularly adept at adapting, interpreting, and expanding Miller’s noirish vision of the character and the world in which he moved). So, naturally, the next step was back to Miller’s Daredevil.

. . . to be continued . . .

A Few Interesting Movies I've Seen Recently

Funny how times gets away from you (more on that later). I'm back, hopefully none the worse for wear. I have a lot of things to cover in the coming weeks. Meanwhile . . .

A Few Interesting Movies I’ve Seen Recently:

Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007)
Brian DePalma’s Redacted (2007)
Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006)
Fabián Bielinsky’s Nine Queens (2000)

The Big Relaunch (coming soon . . .)

Hi everyone. After an unexpectedly long hiatus, I'm back. Over the next few weeks, I'll be doing an unofficial re-launch of this blog, including my recent trip to Urbana, Illinois to attend Ebertfest 2007. See you soon.

My DVD collection

See my DVD collection @ Chasing the Frog

Leonard Schrader

I was saddened yesterday to learn of the passing of Leonard Schrader at the age of 62. Schrader was the brother of writer/director Paul Schrader, with whom he co-wrote The Yakuza and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Blue Collar, and Old Boyfriends. Schrader also received an 1986 Academy Award nomination for his adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman. He also taught at USC, Chapman University, and the American Film Institute, where he was the Senior Filmmaker-in-Residence and chairman of the Screenwriting Department.

Oscar Contenders, Coffee Table Movies, and Prestige Pictures

After an appalling barren spring and summer, we’ve finally reached the season of milk and honey for Hollywood releases. We’ll now have the chance to see the best (according to them, anyway) the studios have to offer, including Scorsese’s The Departed, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige, Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, and Todd Fields’ Little Children.

'The Departed': Choppy craftsmanship?

Check out the discussion on Jim Emerson's blog I'm involved in surrounding remarks that the outstanding film scholar David Bordwell made on his own blog regarding Martin Scorsese's The Departed. What makes a well-edited film anyway?

Schrader's canon

In the September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment, writer-director/critic Paul Schrader offers an interesting contribution the recent discussion regarding the necessity of film canons, defining and defending his own personal vision of the canon and the aesthetic tradition that supports it. Schrader posits seven aesthetic criteria on which to base the canon: beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality. You can read the preface and introduction to Schrader’s article at the magazine’s website. Below is a list of the 60 films that comprise the author’s version of the canon, which Schrader has arranged hierarchically into tiers of twenty films each, each with a “medal” level of gold, silver, and bronze, respectively (I've bolded the films on the list that I have seen, in case you're interested):


Gold
The Rules of the Game – Jean Renoir (1939)
Tokyo Story – Yasujiro Ozu (1953)
City Lights – Charlie Chaplin (1931)
Pickpocket – Robert Bresson (1959)
Metropolis – Fritz Lang (1927)
Citizen Kane – Orson Welles (1941)
Orphee – Jean Cocteau (1950)
Masculin-Feminin – Jean-Luc Godard (1966)
Persona – Ingmar Bergman (1966)
Vertigo – Alfred Hitchcock (1958)
Sunrise – F.W. Murnau (1927)
The Searchers – John Ford (1956)
The Lady Eve – Preston Sturges (1941)
The Conformist – Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)
8 1/2 – Federico Fellini (1963)
The Godfather – Francis Ford Coppola (1972)
In the Mood for Love – Wong Kar Wai (2000)
The Third Man – Carol Reed (1949)
Performance – Donald Cammell/Nicholas Roeg
La Notte – Michelangelo Antonioni (1961)

Silver
Mother and Son – Alexander Sokurov (1997)
The Leopard – Luchino Visconti (1963)
The Dead – John Huston (1987)
2001: A Space Odyssey – Stanley Kubrick (1968)
Last Year at Marienbad – Alain Renais (1961)
The Passion of Joan of Arc – Carl Dreyer (1928)
Jules and Jim – Francois Truffaut (1962)
The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah (1969)
All That Jazz – Bob Fosse (1979)
The Life of Oharu – Kenji Mizoguchi (1952)
High and Low – Akira Kurosawa (1963)
Sweet Smell of Success – Alexander Mackendrick (1957)
That Obscure Object of Desire – Luis Bunuel (1977)
An American in Paris – Vincente Minnelli (1951)
The Battle of Algiers – Gillo Pontecarvo (1966)
Taxi Driver – Martin Scorsese (1976)
Ali: Fear Eats at the Soul – Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1974)
Blue Velvet – David Lynch (1986)
Crimes and Misdemeanors – Woody Allen (1989)
The Big Lebowski – Joel Coen (1998)

Bronze
The Red Shoes – Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger (1948)
Singin’ in the Rain – Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (1952)
Chinatown – Roman Polanski (1974)
The Crowd – King Vidor (1928)
Sunset Boulevard – Billy Wilder (1950)
Talk to Her – Pedro Almodovar (2002)
Shanghai Express – Josef von Sternberg (1932)
Letter from a Unknown Woman – Max Ophuls (1948)
Once Upon a Time in the West – Sergio Leone (1968)
Salvatore Giuliano – Francesco Rosi (1962)
Nostalghia – Andrei Tarkovsky (1983)
Seven Men from Now – Budd Boetticher (1956)
Claire’s Knee – Eric Rohmer (1970)
Earth – Alexander Dovzhenko (1930)
Gun Crazy – Joseph H. Lewis (1949)
Out of the Past – Jacques Tourneur (1947)
Children of Paradise – Marcel Carne (1945)
The Naked Spur – Anthony Mann (1953)
A Place in the Sun – George Stevens (1950)
The General – Buster Keaton (1927)

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

In what (for me anyway) is a major blow to film criticism, the new management at the Village Voice (a publication that's been in a downward spiral for quite some time now) has fired film editor and critic Michael Atkinson, leaving J. Hoberman as the only critic left to make the Voice's Film section worth reading:

Major Shakeup at Village Voice Leaves Only J Hoberman Standing - Cinematical

Incidentally, the Voice also purged longtime music critic Robert Christgau, one of the most important pop music critics of the last half-century.

With Roger Ebert still on the mend, that leaves frightening few outstanding critics current writing reviews accessible on the 'net. There's Jonathan Rosenbaum at the Chicago Reader and Manohla Dargis at the New York Times. Anyone have any other suggestions?