Colin Marshall

Very (Pet Shop Boys, 1993)

I have been known to enjoy, throughout the last eight or so years, flipping through shelves, stacks and bins of used CDs in search of the increasingly rare album I don't already have. Do this enough, and you start to see the same discs pop up again and again. (I run into Savage Garden's first album quite a lot — I'll buy it one of these times, but I'm convinced that its price will, on current trend, soon reach negative numbers.) The most distinctive to my eyes has been the Pet Shop Boys' Very, with its bright orange, entirely opaque case and LEGO-textured front face. I finally broke down and bought it. Not that I was going in blind. I was sort of familiar with the Boys' body of work, but not enough to, you know, name more than two of their titles. When I found that an art TA of Madelaine's — who's actually sitting right across the coffee shop from me as I type — strongly reminded me of lead singer Neil Tennant, I thought to myself, "Hey, the Pet Shop Boys. They use synthesizers. They make pop. They've stood the test of time. Aren't they a band I should like?" This notion intersected my desperation for some new music. So it turns out I do like the Pet Shop Boys, not just for their music — which is often pop at its most well-made — but for the fact that style and aesthetics are integral components not just of their appearance, their videos and their album covers, but of they very entity they comprise. "The style of the Pet Shop Boys" is not a separate concept from "the Pet Shop boys" in the way that, say, "the style of the Dave Matthews Band" is from "the Dave Matthews Band." The Pet Shop Boys are their aesthetics; take the aesthetics away, and you pull a load-bearing block from the band's Jenga tower. Quoth Wikipedia: Traditionally, Pet Shop Boys have always favoured avant-garde tailored fashions. Tennant has referenced the designers of his suits in certain interviews, and Lowe has often sported outfits and glasses made by Issey Miyake, Stüssy and Yohji Yamamoto's Y-3 for Adidas. Presentation has always been a major theme for the Pet Shop Boys, and the duo have dramatically "reinvented" their image twice in their career. In 1993, when promoting their Very album, they wore brightly coloured costumes and used state-of-the-art computer technology to place themselves in a modern computer graphic world. This concept of reinvention was revisited for the promotion of the Nightlife album, in which they transformed their look wearing wigs and glasses with very futuristic urban wardrobes. In 2006 both Tennant and Lowe were seen on stage and in photographs wearing clothes designed by Hedi Slimane/Dior Homme. The duo have always been interested in the artwork, design, and photography for their releases. Photographer Eric Watson helped create the original image of Pet Shop Boys, creating many of their photographs and videos from 1984 to 1991. In design they have primarily worked with Mark Farrow, who designed the cover of their first Parlophone album release in 1986. The collaboration between Mark Farrow and Pet Shop Boys is comparable to the designer-band relationship of Peter Saville and New Order, Anton Corbijn and Depeche Mode, or the epic-length collaboration of Simon Halfon and Paul Weller. Their record sleeves are quite often very minimal, and the attention to detail is obvious, down to the font type and style. In October 2006, they released a 336-page hardcover book entitled Catalogue, showcasing their accomplishments in artwork, design, and of course, music. This retrospective of work is certainly one of the most comprehensive anthologies any music artist could have. I'm going to have to snag that book. So you've probably gathered that I have never complained of any artist or band that they've forgotten that "it used to be about the music." While the music is a critical component of a musician's career — I'm not enough of a contrarian to refute that — it's but one of many. It's the tracks you lay down, but it's also the clothes you wear, the attitude you project, the character you become, the ideas you embody, the dynamic you have with your fellow musicians, the dynamic you have with your fans, the visual choices you make, the positional choices you make. The Pet Shop Boys have internalized this. The only living recording artist to have arguably done it better is Madonna, and I often regret that I'm a too much of a heterosexual male to fully enjoy her. (I doubt any straight man can find a point of entry — har, har — into Madonna any more; she doesn't even have any ogle value, at least no ogle value without a scary edge.) Not that the Pet Shop Boys are exactly the straightest act around; Very has been called the band's "coming-out album" due to its slightly more overt gay content and Tennant's emergence from the public closet around the time of its release. (And keyboard player Chris Lowe tends to muse, when he talks at all, about how there's only one true sexual orientation.) That's all to the good, since I happen to think that the disc's gayest moments — such as the opener "Can You Forgive Her?", where Tennant asks a guy if he'll accept his girlfriend's ridicule of his homosexual tendencies — are its best. That they can produce sharp, clever songs without sacrificing an iota of production value nearly brings me over to the Pet Shop Boys' side by itself; it's the same reason I'm such a Steely Dan fan. Too often, outfits that put work into the verbal content of their songs act as if that gets them a free ride on, y'know sounding good. And don't get me started on the whole "lo-fi" movement.

I, Cringely (Robert X. Cringely, 2007 - )

Not long ago, amidst research for an interview with a big Silicon Valley guy, I Netflix'd a copy of the 1996 PBS series Triumph of the Nerds. Re-watching the program, a brief history of the early adventures of such personal computer pioneers as Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, I came away with two impressions: surprise at how nineties everything looked — boy, I never thought I'd say that — and approval of the hosting skills of that guy in the glasses, khakis and tucked-in polo shirts. (That's how we dressed in the nineties, you see.) He not only knew his stuff, but his skills at what us Max Funsters might call "dad humor" were honed to a fine edge.

He of the shirts and the specs is one Robert X. Cringely, a veteran observer of and commentator on the computing scene. He's done a handful of other PBS series, including one nobody but me has heard of where he builds an airplane by himself. More to the point, he writes a weekly column called I, Cringely and, still more to the point, it's available in podcast form [iTunes link].

Robert X. Cringely is many things: "sex symbol, airplane enthusiast and adventurer," his about page modestly proclaims. "A dirty old man," he calls himself in one podcast. Googlism says the following:

• robert x. cringely is well known throughout the computer industry
  
• robert x. cringely is simply the net's best commentator
  
• robert x. cringely is in fact a real person
  
• robert x. cringely is full of shit
  
• robert x. cringely is really getting on my nerves; i'm trying to remember why i signed up to get his column in the first place
  
• robert x. cringely is a fun

(I like that last one the best.)

Clearly there's some controversy here. Are we talking about a titan of tech journalism, or some gossipy hack? As anything about which opinions so widely vary interests me, I couldn't help but catch up on his body of work. Agree or disagree with his pronouncements — I considered using the word "opinions," but no, they're pronouncements — you have to admit that he's the most reliably entertaining computer pundit in existence.

I, Cringely tackles the critical technology questions of our time, including, recently: What do information technology consultants actually do? [MP3] Why isn't Apple getting on board with Blu-Ray? [MP3] What's going on in Steve Jobs' head? (That one's sort of a Cringely leitmotif, actually.) [MP3]

Cringely regularly exhibits two tendencies: a fixation on Moore's Law, and a penchant for bold predictions. He's not always on target — his current official batting average is .571, which still beats pure chance — but at least he's not one of those of mealy-mouthed, ass-covering equivocators who play it safe but don't play it with guts. Plus — and this is the most important part — he admits when he's wrong. Bob's predictions for 2008 [MP3] include the personal computer's giving of ground to smaller devices that are already morphing — to use a nineties term — into something more PC-like themselves, venture capitalists' turn away from ad-revenue-only firms like Facebook, and Apple's replacement of the mouse with something more happenin'.

(He also predicts that his program NerdTV — billed as "essentially Charlie Rose for geeks" — which gets my blood moving, as I am the biggest Charlie Rose fanboy who has ever lived, and also something of a geek — will return for a second season. You can download the first one now as podcasts and vidcasts.)

Do note that not every I, Cringely column is of general interest: good luck understanding, for example, his piece on Azul Systems' new mainfraime [MP3] if by quirk of fate you don't happen to do a lot of mainframe computing yourself. And hey, isn't this just Robert X. Cringely reading his column out loud? Yes, but he's hell of good at reading. Besides, reading it yourself would be so Web 1.0.

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames (David Sedaris, 2008)

David Sedaris has been publishing humorous autobiographical essays — some simply expanded diary entries — for fourteen years now. This is the fifth and, as of this post's writing, latest collection of them. (I don't count Holidays on Ice, because it's not all new material.)

* * *

I've been a Sedaris fan for almost ten years now. I remember repeatedly calling the University of Washington bookstore to check on my pre-order for Me Talk Pretty One Day, which was before its release tentatively titled Primates on the Seine. I've read my copy of Naked so many times that I'm pleasantly surprised it's still bound. I very nearly missed a flight because I was so wrapped up in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim that I couldn't hear my boarding call. I don't call him my favorite writer because his popularity means I'd be one in a hundred thousand, but he probably is.

In other words, I'm so un-objective about the work of David Sedaris that I wouldn't be able to tell if its quality started sliding, which appears to be the opinion of Kakutani:

With many of these tales, the reader has the sense that Mr. Sedaris is scraping the bottom of the barrel for material, writing for the sake of producing another book, vamping for time instead of looking within or trying something new. His efforts to learn Japanese in “The Smoking Section” recall his earlier efforts to learn French. And his efforts to satirize Ivy League educations are cringe-makingly lame: To temper his father’s enthusiasm about his acceptance into college, he writes, “I announced that I would be majoring in patricide. The Princeton program was very strong back then, the best in the country, but it wasn’t the sort of thing your father could get too worked up about.”

The essays about Mr. Sedaris’s own life tend to leave the reader thinking he’s simply got too much spare time on his hands. He talks about doing crossword puzzles, making scarecrows out of record album covers to scare away birds banging into his windows, and finding ways to trap live flies so he can feed them to the spiders in his country house in France. Finding the perfect gift for his boyfriend, Hugh, takes time, and so does quitting smoking, especially since he’s rented an apartment in Tokyo to facilitate the process — or to give him something more to write about.

She ends by calling the book "incredibly mediocre." I was surprised; I laughed my way through the thing and can't wait to forget the details so that I can pick it up again. But is this just a case of a loyal fan cutting too much slack? Maybe, though I've never found myself possessed of — by? — that degree of fandom in any other area of life. Enjoyment of one installment of something mdash; book, film, album, whatever — has historically been a poor predictor of whether I'll like another.

I think the more plausible explanation is in fact the same one as for why I latched onto Sedaris' essays in the first place: they have just the right set of qualities that align with my preferences. Exactly which qualities those are I'm not sure — most likely the sentence-level craft, as well as the humor's focus on what I call "everyday grotesquerie" — but they make his work resonate with me, even the work that doesn't resonate so much with the average reader.

And besides:

The desire to pass is loaded territory and can lead to the ugliest sort of argument there is. "You want to be French, Mary Frances, that's your problem, but instead you're just another American." I went to the window for that one and saw a marriage disintegrate before my eyes. Poor Mary Frances in her beige beret. Back at the hotel it had probably seemed like a good idea, but now it was ruined and ridiculous, a cheap felt pancake sliding off the back of her head. She'd done the little scarf thing, too, not caring that it was summer. It could have been worse, I thought . She could have been wearing one of those striped boater's shirts, but, as it was, it was pretty bad, a costume, really.

Some vacationers raise the roof — they don't care who hears them — but Mary Frances spoke in a whisper. This, too, was seen as a pretension and made her husband even angried. "Americans," he repeated. "We don't live in France, we live in Virginia. Vienna, Virginia. Got it?"

I ask you this: what book containing that piece of writing could possibly be a bad book? (And I also ask you this: what's up with the American fetishization of France? I can't fathom it. The fetishization of any foreign country mystifies me, really, but France seems to be the most common choice.)

The Reduced Shakespeare Company Podcast (The Reduced Shakespeare Company, 2007 - )

Let's be clear: this is not a podcast meant to spoon-feed The Bard's words in puréed, sugar coated globules to shiftless, slack-jawed, grafted-to-their-white-earphones members of Generation Y. It's not the audio book of the Sparknotes to the Cliffs Notes. It's not even strictly about Shakespeare. "But surely," you stammer, flummoxed, "the very title... ?" Permit me an explanation.

The Reduced Shakespeare Company is a bunch of guys — and sometimes gals — who have been around, in one form or another, for upwards of 25 years, all the while re-interpreting — dare I say "remixing" — Mankind's Important Works^TM live on stage all around the world, even in the countries that don't speak Middle English. They take their name from their bread-and-butter flagship show, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), but they also do Western Civilization: The Complete Musical (abridged), The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), The Complete History of America (abridged) — godless Euro-Max-Funsters, you are now free to snark about how the previous two can't be that different — All the Great Books (abridged) and Completely Hollywood (abridged).

To do all those shows, you'd have to be both well-cultured and quick of foot and brain. Fortunately for them and for us, the players of the RSC all pack foot, brain and culture with no room in their luggage to spare. I think the costumes are shipped separately, but I don't know because they haven't put out a podcast about that yet. They have, however, released 78 episodes so far [iTunes link], many of which get into the nuts and bolts of what it's like to be a Reduced Shakespearean: how to play to a tiny crowd riddled with decrepitude [MP3], how to improv your way through flubs [MP3] and how to react to laughs that don't come [MP3]. If you're keen on joining the troupe, they even tell you how to audition [MP3]. (Don't get your hopes up.)

But it's not all stage geekery; there's also plenty of specifically Shakespeare geekery: note the humor-leavened discussion of the "authorship question" [MP3] that has dogged Shakespeare's plays for so long and has caused so much ivory-tower hand-wringing, or the one about the difficulties of teaching Shakespeare to middle- and high-schoolers [MP3]. (Solution: let the kids use modern-day swearing.)

And let's not forget the internet geekery. Unlike so many staid theater groups that look down their noses at the whole of technology culture, the RSC is on the vanguard as internet presences go. There's the podcast, sure, but they've got a MySpace page and a Facebook group as well. In one podcast, they even discuss, in detail, the relative merits of MySpace versus those of Facebook [MP3]. (My understanding was that MySpace was for poor people, but apparently it's more complicated than that.) And while we're on the subject of geekery, in another podcast they discuss the difference between a "nerd" and a "geek" with The Word Nerds [MP3].

The podcast hits the tubes every Monday, with an average of twenty minutes of content per week. It's quick, and it's slick: they seem to pay as much attention to the music as they do in their live shows — and if you haven't seen one, they're on DVD — and they'll often go the extra mile with conference calls including even more members of the group or segments recorded on location at whatever theater they're playing at the time. And if you're really lucky, they sometimes send an original, Dickens-based audio production your way [MP3].

Humanities scholars say that "reductive" is the worst slur with which you can be tagged. But with their podcast, as with their other ventures, the Reduced Shakespeare Company has proven once again the detachment of humanities scholars from reality. If reduction is wrong, I don't want to be right.

[Originally published at Maximumfun.org.]

Starting Out in the Evening (Andrew Wagner, 2007)

Late-middle-aged novelist Leonard Schiller's routine of struggle against his incomplete One Last Big Book is disrupted when a young graduate student demands interviews as research for her thesis which will, at least in her mind, breathe new life into the man's forgotten body of work. Also, his daughter is dating a black guy.

* * *

I was excited about this movie. Rich subject matter? Check. Substantive source material? Check. A $500,000 budget that would force the filmmakers to look for creative solutions? Check. Approval from critics I respect? Check.

And yet. Don't get me wrong; I liked Starting Out in the Evening, but I wanted to love it. I can't quite piece together why it doesn't close the like-love gap, but I'm going to try anyway. If you'll permit me to continue beating the "war against cliché" theme, the film fights much too lackadaisically, especially in the character department.

That Schiller is basically Joe Every-Silent-Generation-Novelist constitutes the most costly lost battle. I'm not even sure what his books are supposed to be about, why they were initially embraced, or what the specific differences are between the successful first two and less-well-received second two. Why can't he sell the new book? Word salad about how "nobody" reads literary novels these days. The grad student that invades Schiller's bubble isn't much better defined: she likes his books because she does. She discovered them at the Rural Nowheresville library near which she grew up, and they set her free to soar, etc.

Secondarily, we get the daughter who can't commit to a man, who wants a kid — biological clock! — but not a marriage. She gets back with the rogue boyfriend who doesn't want a kid, because that would compromise his dream: "to create a venue for people on the left to argue." (Which of course the left has no opportunity for today.)

So I guess the problem is that the characters are smooth and featureless, which is fine in a story of ideas, but this isn't a story of ideas — it's theoretically a character-driven one. I'm making it sound awful with all this ragging, but it's not disastrous; it's quite watchable, really. But why not more wrinkles? More nuance? More unusual details? Many critics acclaim the choice not to have Schiller and his worshipper jump into bed — immediately, anyway — but I found myself only wishing for more decisions like that — a lot more. There's some roughage toward the end, but by then it's too late. Maybe I'll read the book.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Jeffrey Blitz's Rocket Science
8. Robinson Devor's Zoo
9. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
10. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding
14. Jason Reitman's Juno
15. Tamara Jenkins' The Savages
16. David Fincher's Zodiac
17. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
18. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
19. Greg Mottola's Superbad
20. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
21. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
22. Andrew Wagner's Starting Out in the Evening
23. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
24. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
25. Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth
26. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
27. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
28. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
29. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
30. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

The Savages (Tamara Jenkins, 2007)

Two siblings, the brother a professor of German theater and the sister a frustrated playwright, receive word that their estranged elderly father has commenced writing on the wall with his own feces. As he'd been the live-in boyfriend of another oldster, one who just recently shuffled from the mortal coil, he's foisted onto his kids, who have no idea what to do with this rapidly deteriorating practical stranger.

* * *

If you heard my interview with Tyler Cowen, you know that Mr. Marginal Revolution walked out of this one. Not being as savvy a consumer of culture as that particular economist, I stick out every film I watch, every book I read and every performance I attend to the bitter end. But the funny thing is that the end is never bitter; I can't recall a single work that I've wanted to ditch in midstream. Either I'm less discriminating than most viewers, or I have a highly advanced culture filter that eliminates bad choices before they drift onto my viewscreen.

The Savages taps into a near-universal question in the developed world, where we don't send our aged out to sea on ice floes, but we're sure as hell not going to let them move in with us: what to do with the 'rents? Us Gen-Yers don't have to worry so much about this, since our parents the Baby Boomers will engineer themselves eternal youth or die trying. The Boomers themselves, though, are wondering what to do with the remainder of the Greatest Generation. Non-healthcare-professionals are generally too busy to take care of an unhealthy relative, retirement homes seem anachronistic and somewhat déclassé, and the fancier places that mask their retirement-hominess are really pricey.

And for the siblings Savage, the problem is compounded both by the fact that they don't like or even particularly know their father — he's a fraction of a step removed from just some guy who's fallen into their charge — and they don't know how to do anything about anything. This is a humanities professor and a temp we're talking about; their survival does not hinge on skills applicable to the concrete world. Consequently, they're basically t-boned by Dad's sudden, unwelcome re-entry into their lives. The old man believes his son is a doctor; well, yes, doctor of philosophy. In theater. 20th-century German theater. "I have an MFA," the daughter pathetically, quizzically asserts, reflecting in her mid-forties on a life that's amounted to basically nothing of consequence. (I love it when I can adopt as taglines things said by people real or fictitious. This NYT article gave me "I went to Juilliard," which should be delivered similarly, with simultaneous petulance and bewilderedness.)

Other excellently-observed slices of life came out this year, namely Rocket Science and Margot at the Wedding. Though far from a clichéfest, The Savages doesn't benefit from the comparison. It's what your aunt might call "different," but by 2007 standards, that's not different enough. Or maybe I'm spoiled, is what I am.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Jeffrey Blitz's Rocket Science
8. Robinson Devor's Zoo
9. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
10. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding
14. Jason Reitman's Juno
15. Tamara Jenkins' The Savages
16. David Fincher's Zodiac
17. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
18. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
19. Greg Mottola's Superbad
20. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
21. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
22. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
23. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
24. Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth
25. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
26. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
27. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
28. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
29. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

Living in a Magazine (Zoot Woman, 2001)

Upon identifying my four very favorite songs, I punched them all into Pandora so it would, with any luck, spit back a selection of tracks with similar musical properties. Maybe I had an even more favorite song of which I was unaware!

One of the first results to grab me was Zoot Woman's "Jessie", a cut from their 2001 album Living in a Magazine. After the initial "wow, this is great" impulse, I researched the band and discovered that they're a going concern, and a youngish one at that. That's unusual — most of the groups or artists I latch onto have decades of recording behind them, are defunct, or have gone defunct and are on at least their first comeback. The charitable spin is that I prefer to listen to what's stood the Test of Time; what's more likely is that I'm terrified of wiping out while surfing the wave of the moment's current, fleeting trend.

So — and this, for me, is unprecedented — I immediately went on iTunes and bought the album — that's how strong I found "Jessie". The worst case scenario would be one with which we're all familiar, wherein the rest of the disc sounds nothing like the attractive track. Fortunately, that's not the case with Living in a Magazine, a suite of pretty damn well-crafted pop — and pop is one of our time's prime venues for craft — that uses synthesizers in a way that no English pop group has done in decades. I thought synths had become the domain of the laboriously retro (bad) or the the laboriously D.I.Y. (worse), but Zoot Woman showed me otherwise.

That said, the album has some dead zones, especially when things get a little too jangly — in my world, "jangly" is absolutely the most damning pejorative applicable to music — but there's another standout track, "Information First", that's nearly "Jessie"'s equal, especially when it comes to working the synth pads. Sadly, it appears that Zoot Woman have since abandoned the slick pop tradition for something called "electroclash," a term I sometimes hear associated with decent dance-y stuff but more often with garden-variety ugly sounds. A released track from their upcoming album sounds acceptable, I guess, if a little goofy and not particularly distinctive.

I've got a bunch of musical ideas of my own, but not much experience producing the stuff. As I build my home recording studio, it approaches the level where I can use to crank out not just radio shows but fine tunes as well. With this goal in mind, I listen to music for stuff to copy even more than I listen for DJing material or for my own pure aesthetic response. Since I'd ideally like to work on projects with a distinct pop sensibility, a polished surface and a slight edge of cold detachment without irony (note italics), there's a lot I want to copy in Living in a Magazine, so it must be good!

Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007)

With her young teenage son in tow, a late-thirtysomething novelist visits her fortysomething sister for the first time in years, or maybe even in decades. The occasion is the sister's wedding to a depressed, unemployed, ironically mustachioed writer of letters to the editor. The older sister disapproves, the younger sister does a bad job of keeping her pregnancy under wraps, and the sisterly dynamic of one-upmanship — one-upwomanship? — re-emerges between them.

* * *

I love it when a director gets better with time. You'd think that would be the norm, as any skill increases with accrued experience, but filmmakers have this problem where the quality of their work tends to oscillate rather than steadily increase. (Textbook examples: Coppola and Altman.) Noah Baumbach, though, looks to be marching defiantly toward a better tomorrow for all filmgoers.

Kicking and Screaming, his mid-90s debut, struck me as false, especially since I'm now a feeling-the-way-forward postcollegiate like its characters. Ten years later, his The Squid and the Whale impressed me so much that I was compelled to revisit his back catalog — and still found it wanting. Margot at the Wedding, the follow up to The Squid, does its part to confirm the impression that Baumbach's on his way up. But what, specifically, is Baumbach good at? I think the quality he's mastering was best described by Tilda Swinton in her address at the 2006 San Francisco International Film Festival:

Can I be alone in my longing for inarticulacy, for a cinema that refuses to join all the dots? For an arrhythmia in gesture, for a dissonance in shape? For the context of cinematic frame, a frame that in the end only cinema can provide, for the full view, the long shot, the space between, the gaps, the pause, the lull, the grace of living.

The figurative cinema’s awkward and rather unsavory relationship with its fruity old aunt, the theater, to her vanities, her moues, her beautifully constructed and perennially eloquent speechifying, her cast iron, corset-like structures, her melodramatic texture and her histrionic rhythms. How tiresome it is; it always has been. How studied. The idea of absolute articulacy, prefect timing, a vapid elegance of gesture, an unblinking, unthinking face. What a blessed waste of a good clear screen, a dark room and the possibility of an unwatched profile, a tree, a hill, a donkey.

How I long for documentary, in resistance. For unpowdered faces and unmeasured tread. For the emotionally undemonstrative family scene. For a struggle for unreachable words. For the open or even unhappy ending? The occasionally dropped shoe off the heel, the jiggle to readjust, the occasionally cracked egg, the mess of milk spilled. The concept of loss for words. For a State of Cinema — as the state of grace that it affords us — in which nothing much happens, but all things are possible — even articulacy, even failure, even mess.

Am I going to be much more articulate than that at 10:30 at night? Not likely. That's not only Swinton's cinematic manifesto, it's my cinematic manifesto, partially visible in my evaluative patterns: I loves me some unjoined dots, some arrhythmia, some dissonance, some gaps, some pauses, some undemonstration, some open endings, some cracked eggs and spilled milk. When deciding if I enjoy a film or not, I could do worse than just checking to see how many of Swinton's qualities it possesses.

Baumbach is getting there. Where Kicking and Screaming held on to a bunch of little theatricalities, The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding are free of them, blessedly so. To use a stupid, stupid term, they're more "real." Their characters endure all the awkward half-interactions, moments of silence, and fumbled reactions of life as we live it. Things don't fall together for them within the allotted time, nor may they ever. Nobody launches into a bolted-on expository monologue for the benefit of audiences that need to be all but carried through the narrative. We never even learn what caused bad blood between the sisters in the first place — and that's representative of all that's right with Margot.

* * *

1. Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2. Julian Schnabel's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly
3. Béla Tarr's The Man from London
4. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood
5. Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men
6. Anton Corbijn's Control
7. Jeffrey Blitz's Rocket Science
8. Robinson Devor's Zoo
9. Ang Lee's Lust, Caution
10. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others
11. Gary Hustwit's Helvetica
12. Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited
13. Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding
14. Jason Reitman's Juno
15. David Fincher's Zodiac
16. Matthew Ogens' Confessions of a Superhero
17. David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises
18. Greg Mottola's Superbad
19. Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That
20. Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
21. Anthony Hopkins' Slipstream
22. Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's Persepolis
23. Francis Ford Coppola's Youth Without Youth
24. Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
25. Kenneth Branagh's Sleuth
26. Jake Kasdan's The TV Set
27. David Silverman's The Simpsons Movie
28. J.A. Bayona's The Orphanage

Vengeance is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979)

In early 1960s Japan, an unassuming fellow named Akira Nishigushi went around killing, conning, and conning and killing. Since they assumed the conning was unrelated to the killing, the cops had trouble tracking Nishiguchi down, so he made a bit of a circuit around the country even as the manhunt was on. Filmmaker Shohei Imamura took a book about the real-life killer and made it into a fiction film, renaming the protagonist "Iwao Enokizu" but holding much else constant.

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This is a great movie not just because of its beautiful photography and near-perfect pacing — strong points of most of my favorite Japanese filmmakers, come to think of it — but because of the critical blow it deals to the stupidest, lamest cliché of the serial killer genre: building a motive.

Iwao Enokizu makes Anton Chigurh look like a psychological neat little package. Vengeance is Mine, the title proclaims, as if he has anything to enact vengeance for. He kills, he impersonates a professor, he kills, he moves into a brothel, he kills. He appears to have no drive except a reptilian survival instinct. But he could still survive without committing quite so much murder, so why does he do it? Imamura, to his infinite credit, does not insult the audience by constructing some phony-baloney explanation. During a flashback depicting the humiliation of Enokizu's father at the hands of a naval officer, I feared the worst, but no, Imamura makes absolutely no attempt to root the man's later life in a single childhood trauma. (I even suspect that the scene is in the film to point out the fatuousness of such a device.)

I'm getting at an important lesson in narrative that we can all stand to learn: when a storyteller attempts to explain every little thing, he just winds up looking ridiculous. If an audience is presented with x, b, and maybe a few letters in between, they don't necessarily need to hear everything else z through a. That's always a slog, and the all too perceptible strain of an author just pretending to know definitively what z through a are makes the audience cringe in embarrassment for him. Ironically, laying out the lives and interactions of the characters like a flowchart renders their story less, not more, realistic. Think about it: could you really put document exhaustively the causes and effects of the events of one day in your life without the resulting narrative lookin' not only like some serious bullshit, but being stultifyingly pedantic as well? Now try shoehorning in that you did what you did because, I don't know, you used to get a beating whenever you wet the bed.

A blog post I read recently referenced the old E.M. Forster line: "'The King died and the Queen died' is a story. 'The King died and the Queen died of grief' is a plot." Taking it one step further, "The King contracted typhoid fever from a misadventure in the stables and then, directly as a result of the King's death, the Queen died of grief" is a crappy story. Vengeance is Mine exemplifies the non-crappy story.

W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971)

No easy way to explain this: it's partially a semi-fictional "documentary" on Austrian analyst and Freud protégé Wilhelm Reich, partially the musings of transvestite and Warhol hanger-on Jackie Curtis, partially footage of a guy wandering Manhattan with a toy gun, and partially the story of a Yugoslavian woman who falls for a virile Russian figure skater who ultimately chops her head off with the blade of his skate. Also, plaster erection-casting.

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Zuh? I mean, this film is really entertaining, but... juh?

Ebert elevated W.R. into his rarefied "Great Movies" canon, so maybe I should just throw to him:

To list "WR" as a great movie will stir outrage from some. "I never, in all my years of moviegoing, booed a film, no matter how bad, boring or insipid the film might have been," wrote David Bienstock in The New York Times. "Sometimes the crime being committed in the name of cinema seemed outrageous enough to justify such a response, but I restrained myself."

"WR" offended him principally because of its distortions of the teachings of Reich, which he felt amounted to character assassination. That Bienstock took the film as being serious about Reich, or anything else, is surprising.

"Collage," [Jonathan] Rosenbaum calls Makavejev's style. Yes. Materials from anywhere come together to create whatever it is you get from it. The movie embodies the very essence of the hippie and flower-power period, which is maybe why it was a box-office hit (the nudity and X rating didn't hurt, although there is no specifically erotic material). It is as evocative of its time as "Woodstock." I think Makavejev's purpose is to ridicule authorities in the areas of sex and politics (Stalin comes in for some rough sledding), and to suggest we'd get along just fine without anyone issuing us instructions in either area.

Of all the movie's threads, viewers seem to appreciate the ice skater romance the most, not least because it's a near-transparently-veiled allegory for communism. (The killer skater is even named Vladimir Ilyich. Yes, really.) I enjoyed it too, except for an oddball incompatibility between my DVD player and the Criterion DVD which rendered the subtitle button unresponsive. Though the bulk of W.R. is in English, the skater story isn't, so I just watched and listened really hard, trying to pick up what I could. Fortunately, the acting is super-theatrical, so plenty of information comes across.

I came away extremely intrigued by Makavejev; if a filmmaker's project can be a total mess, contain large stretches of foreign dialogue and still keep me glued to the screen, that's a filmmaker I should — nay, must — learn more about.