Colin Marshall

Note on Astley

I'm slightly irked by the (now nearly passed) craze of Rickrolling, the practice of posting disguised links to the Youtubed music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up", but not because of the normal reasons to dislike easily-replicated net memes. The trend bugs me because I, earlier this decade, actually listened to and appreciated a lot of Rick Astley's music, and I can't stand being linked, however distantly and indirectly, to any kind of ironic enjoyment. I'm basically Dave Erdman.

Or at least I'm a Dave Erdman who appreciates pop music over a decade old. The statute of limitations isn't there because I labor under the delusion that music was better before; I just like to have a filter in place that simplifies the selection process. Kinda like how I prefer video games to be at least two decades old, or how the dual filters of had-to-withstand-the-test-of-time and had-to-withstand-transplantation-from-a-faraway-culture effectively winnow down film's possibility space to some of the creamier of the crop. Astley's first album, Whenever You Need Somebody, at both nearly 22 years old and, being British, of foreign provenance, passes through a couple filters. So it's allowed.

I first learned of Rick Astley from one of those television commersials — I'm not sure whether they do these anymore — offering a mix tape, CD or whatever. To give the viewer an idea of the selection to be enjoyed with purchase, these spots would scroll the song titles, in white, up the screen; when a song title scrolled past in yellow, a clip from that song would play. (This one is representative, and, though not the particular one I'm talking about, serves up a bit of an Astley song nonetheless.) So Astley's "Together Forever" took its turn in the yellow, I heard about three seconds of it, and my brain, operating on all the musical data accumulated consciously and subconsciously, advised me to go rush that song down. I fired up Napster, Audiogalaxy, Morpheus or whichever piece of filesharing software I was too cool to use in those days and got frustrated trying to download it on dial-up. Then I drove to my usual used-CD haunts on Seattle's University Way and immediately snapped up Whenever You Need Somebody and its follow-up, Hold Me in Your Arms, instead.

Popping the first album into my car's CD player, I heard what sounded to me like some rock-solid pop music. For the first few listens, the wall of Stock Aitken Waterman production simply crashed forth like one big undifferentiated wave of rounded bass, synthesizer pads and overlaid digital glockenspiels, but that was fine by me. Only on repeated inspection did I discover that the tracks were actually quite different. For instance, I'm man enough today to admit that I don't really like "Together Forever" — I find it lazy — and it's safe to say that, if overexposure hadn't dulled "Never Gonna Give You Up" by the end of the 1980s, it's done it a dozen times over today. The title song, however, was and remains my favorite of these big three disc-openers:


(Please excuse the Thomas the Tank Engine video; it's the only one that allowed embedding.)

At first listen, "Whenever You Need Somebody" sounds more or less the same as "Never Gonna Give You Up", but notice one thing: cooler bass. Also notice how each element of the song is just slightly more unusual than its equivalents in the bigger hit. Theme, for instance: given the choice between a song where the guy professes his ironclad devotion to the girl — what else is new? — and one where the guy honestly levels the girl that, yeah, he wants to get with her and thinks she's keen and all, but he's not going to work his boxers in a twist if she doesn't reciprocate. He'll just operate outside of the normal relationship framework instead; no big deal. He's cool. He'll be around. ( once pointed out to me that the track is a retooling of an earlier SAW production for O'Chi Brown. The original's not bad, though the sound's a bit thin by comparison.)

I get the impression that, due to its opening trifecta of "Never Gonna Give You Up", "Whenever You Need Somebody" and "Together Forever", Whenever You Need Somebody is critically regarded as somewhat front-loaded. And indeed, those three are followed by a version of "It Would Take a Strong Strong Man" that does not justify its own existence. (I actually kind of hated it even when the disc was at its peak in my personal rotation.) But the track after that? Different story.


"The Love Has Gone" is choice. In fact, I have it on good authority that it's Rick's own favorite from the album, so there. (To quote that same authority, "the song have a danceable tune but very romantic.") The impact of the very first two seconds is enough to keep me starting the song over and over, or at least I would if I didn't like the synth line over the first eight bars so much. It doesn't hurt that the bass is very nearly S.O.S. Band-like. It also avoids the simple repetition of "I love this woman!", opting instead for something a hairsbreadth more thematically complex. Many of my favorite poppiest-of-the-pop tunes have this form, although it may be more simple correlation (what I like sonically tends to fit with it lyrically) than anything:

1. I love this woman!
2. Except, crap, I just realized she walked out on me.
3. Weird. I wonder why?
4. Hey, I bet I could get her back if I really tried.
5. Y'know, screw it, I'm going to do it, hell or high water.

(Information Society's "Back in the Day", from their latest album Synthesizer, has much the same deal going on, and I've been playing it damn near nonstop this week.)

I have many, many memories of hopping into my car after a workout at the gym, popping in Whenever You Need Somebody — during one long stretch, it was probably already in there anyway — punching it straight ahead to track five and and mentally preparing myself to kick the ass of whatever task lay ahead. I would then follow one listen of the song with another listen of it; call that a "cooldown round". Then would come track six, "Don't Say Goodbye", which doesn't sound like much of anything, but one understimates it at one's peril. Production-wise, I like it quite well — despite going back and forth on whatever that thing is making the boingy pattern on the high end of the percussion — and content-wise, it's not far from the previous number: whatever the guy and the girl had fell apart, but maybe it'll come back together. The difference is that here, the reunion is just a big "maybe", as opposed to the resolve of "The Love Has Gone". It's more like he's begging in "Don't Say Goodbye". Kinda undignified, y'ask me.

Whenever You Need Somebody runs mostly downhill from there. "Slipping Away" merits an honorable number of listens but doesn't ultimately work, "No More Looking For Love" is so bland that it isn't even on Youtube, "You Move Me" isn't much better, and "When I Fall in Love" is another non-existence-justifying cover, not to mention a badly jarring departure from the rest of the set. But I still like the album, even though it'll never again enjoy the same kind of favor from me that I bestowed upon it in high school.

The rest of Astley's catalog is really spotty. Hold Me in Your Arms, his second full-length release, is a quality inverse, having about as many solid tracks as Whenever You Need Somebody has shoddy ones. I seem to recall working up some degree of enthusiasm for "She Wants to Dance With Me" (I liked how they did the verses way more than the choruses and prechoruses), but it's enthusiasm I can't quite resummon. "I Don't Want to Lose Her" would theoretically be this disc's "The Love Has Gone" — I listened to it more than enough times to make that judgment — and I like the guy-reacquiring-girl ambition and all, but goddamn does that steel drum bridge bother me these days. Sophomore slump, I guess. One more data point proving late-80s stuff inferior to early- and mid-80s stuff.

Whether it was Astley's own decision or a handler's, 1990's Free took him in what one might call an "adult contemporary" direction, which I would call a bad move due to the fact that (a) it watered down the pop element and (b) the adult contemporary sphere, such as it is, already had one Michael McDonald and didn't need two. I'd link you up to the disc's opening cut, "In the Name of Love" (yeah, it is time to ban that title), but nobody's Youtubed it, so here's the second-best, "Move Right Out". I can't even remember anything else on Free, which is sort of a terrible sign because I did give it chance after chance.

Three years later came Body and Soul, which I used to think was Astley's nadir but which I've come to see as a net improvement over its predecessor. To be fair, it's a tall order not to frown on an album whose opener is a near-stereotypical exemplar of that early-90s fad where pop stars tried to get all "socially conscious". Because what solves the problem of hungry babies? Rick Astley singing about hungry babies. The whole thing is actually thematically imbecilic — if only you could hear the non-Youtubed paean to womanhood "Nature's Gift", which probably scores the chyx but is nonetheless laughable — but, on a production level, it sounds better and more distinctive than Free.

It wasn't until 2001 that the world would see and hear new Rick Astley material, and when he resurfaced with a video, hot damn was I excited:


My esteem for the "Sleeping" video remains high to this day. (I've said it before and I'll say it again: black-and-white is choice.) As for the song itself, well, almost as high; it probably helped at the time that I had lyrically similar problems getting to sleep with reasonable regularity. Nevertheless, I know full well that I would kill to produce a track that sounds half as solid. Its album, Keep it Turned On, definitely outshines the three that preceded it, but — let's get this out in the open — it lacks three important qualities: Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Perhaps in 2011, when the disc will qualify as decade-old pop music, I'll change my mindset. (Until then, I simply tend to my Savage Garden collection.)

I continue to keep an eye on Rick Astley, though he's put out nothing of interest in eight years. There was a covers album, Portrait, in 2005, but oy, again with the covers. I feel like I shouldn't write the guy off, though; it still seems entirely plausible that he could bust out another "The Love Has Gone" the moment my back is turned, and boy, wouldn't I feel like an a-hole then.

SBIFF '09 report

Despite my insatiable lust for all that is film and my half-decade-plus of residence in Santa Barbara, I have somehow never managed to have a complete Santa Barbara International Film Festival experience. I could almost excuse this in festivals past due to my reliance on bus travel, but this year, living no more than six or seven blocks away from all the screenings, I vowed to carpe me some cinematic diem. Nine diems, actually, a stretch in which I took in nine new films. The beauty of a festival like the SBIFF is that I can just waltz into a theater with very little advance knowledge about what I'm going to see except that I'll probably never get a chance to catch a theatrical screening of it again. The randomness factor is considerable too, and you know how I feel about randomness.

A set of mini-writeups of each of the movies I viewed at the SBIFF follows, in ascending order of choiceness. 

Anna Chi's Dim Sum Funeral isn't anything. Rather, it's something, but it's something delivered soap-operatically, where each and every scene contains — nay, demands — the verbal statement of a plot point by one of the characters. The fully Americanized adult children of a dead Chinese matriarch are called by her personal assistant (and their former nanny) to her McMansion in order to participate in her elaborate traditional funeral. But wait! Turns out the ol' battle axe is actually still alive; she was just hiding out in a little-known wing of the house, observing her fractious family brought together by the faked death. The kids — a philandering doctor, a lesbian B-movie ninja, a woman clearly well beyond childbearing age who nevertheless ends the movie with a baby and an undefined real estate agent with a blasian son — are justifiably angered by this, but they wind up forgiving mom anyway. Yeah.


Vinko Moderndorfer's Landscape No. 2 is a little more of a thing, but its characters still aren't anything. The chunky but hardworking theater guy who introduced the screening called the movie "No Country for Old Men without the pretension," which was another vague, posturing use of "pretension" that I could have done without, but he was at least right about the formal resemblance. A feckless thug named Sergej and his mentor in thievery swipe a retired official's painting on the justification that it was stolen in the first place, but unbeknownst to them, they also get a sheaf of old papers that reveal said official as one of those Eastern European generals who gave the wrong orders after World War II. In order to preserve his spotless reputation, this ex-massacre-er sends out a Menacing, Laconic Assassin^TM to retrieve the papers. The killer wastes Sergej's partner in crime, his two girlfriends (both pregnant) and even his flaming neighbor without reaching his quarry, which happens to be on our hapless hero's person. When antagonist finally catches up with protagonist in a forest clearing/mass grave, the papers burn on some candles and the assassin throws himself down a bottomless hole. 

I feel as if I've seen everything in this movie before — you probably have, too — except for its Slovenian location. If this were a Hollywood picture I'd have no patience for it, but the foreign location held my interest just enough to compensate for the cast of total and utter ciphers, most of whom wound up knifed anyway.


Issei Shibata's The Chasing World belongs to a genre that, to the best of my knowledge, doesn't yet have a proper name. It's low-budget action, to be sure, but it's low-budget in the way that action movies can be low-budget these days and still have loads of (a very particular type of) special effects. It's also Japanese and deals with multiple universes and whatnot. The central concept is actually pretty simple: there are at least two parallel realities, and if a person exists in one of these realities, another version of that person exists in the other, unless they are the protagonist of The Chasing World, in which case they're born of a mother with the power to hop back and forth between realities and thus birth a son in only one of them. This kid starts out in a reality that looks pretty much like the 21st-century Japan we know, but is then pulled into the other one, where the country suffers under the horrific reign of the King of Japan, who looks on from his massive palace as his red-eyed, black-clad ex-convict agents swarm through the streets, ordered to capture anyone with the last name of Satou. Since that's more or less the Japanese Smith, the population really thins out. (What is it with Japanese culture and anonymous, black-suited, red-eye-glowin' killers anyway? This stuff extends way beyond the Kerberos saga.)

It's simple but nonetheless kind of neat that nearly the entire supporting cast gets just-slightly-off mirror images in both realities, but the movie doesn't do much to act on that device's potential. Ultimately it executes the story in a sadly pedestrian fashion, dropping the viewer (by way of the hero) into a semi-recognizable setting with a few initially unexplained strangenesses, then gradually explaining those strangenesses. How should one react to this, exactly? "Hey, movie, I see what you did there." (Since Madelaine thought it notable, I suppose I'll add that most of the cast is refreshingly awkward-looking: crooked teeth, acne scars, that sort of thing. Except for this one guy who, 200 years ago, would've been kabuki woman material.)


Peter Jones' Inventing L.A. tells the story of the Los Angeles Times and the Chandler family who owned and operated it for most of its lifetime thus far. (Given the paper's current state, I guess we'll see how long "thus far" applies.) Like all enjoyable documentaries, this one takes on a subject about which I brought very little advance knowledge of my own. Like many bad documentaries, alas, it feels the need to slather all kinds of hokey visual effects onto its still images and talking heads. (What, are they trying to retain the valuable 11-year-old demographic or something?) The worst offender is whatever was done to the black-and-white pre-1950s photographs: each element in them was apparently cut out and made into separate layer, resulting in an unsettling parallax scrolling effect when the camera moves across the image. But the story's solid and the research impeccable, so my quibbles with the look and feel are just that. (In my defense, they're representative of the current trends I dislike most in documentary filmmaking.)

A Q&A followed the screening (which was the film's official premiere) wherein Jones, a film critic from the Christian Science Monitor and one of the remaining Chandlers endured rambling non-questions about the future of the Times, the future of newspapers printed on god-honest paper and the future of the Noble Fourth Estate itself. Fortunately, they were able to take the barrage in good humor. Given my mind's on-documentary-makin' state of late, I watched the movie with an eye toward the technical and structural, and thus took much from Jones' mid-Q&A remark that his procedure was to gather all the clippings, pictures, shots and interviews and then spend three years "marinating" in it in the editing room. I guess the muse really doesvisit only during the act of creation.


Ryoichi Kimizuka's Nobody to Watch Over Me is a sharp but, upon reflection, rather unsubtle indictment of Japan's bloodthirsty paparazzi, its no-win police culture of expediency and its popular tendency to treat the relatives of murder suspects as morally equivalent to actual murderers. I'm not sure if non-Japanese viewers with no knowledge of the place could find much to latch onto in it, revolving as it does around such Nihon-centric things as high schoolers whose only valve for parentally-applied pressure is stabbing six-year-olds and elaborate police procedures for getting six-year-old-stabbers' families the hell out of dodge. Still, it is non-preposterous, unlike every single other weary-cop-protects-feisty-young-girl movie I've ever seen before or, quite likely, will ever see again. 


Doug Pray's Art and Copy was a treat. I thought an interview recording had 86ed my chances of seeing it, but then the interview fell through. When I got there, I found out that Pray, a documentarian I've admired for a couple years now, would, along with his ragtag filmmaking team, give a post-movie Q&A. The film itself was maybe a bit thin as far as the actual mechanics of how ads are created and why certain ads strike the zeitgeist while others don't — the attempted explanations given aren't many rungs up from "voodoo" — but I'm mostly just grateful to see any observation of advertising that doesn't immediately go the "OMG advertising corporations mind control consumerism negative body images poisoning our daughters" angle. You see, I don't mind advertising — 30-second TV spots repeated ad nauseam must get old, but never see them — and find it to be a perfectly legitimate audio/visual/aesthetic craft. (I especially don't mind that making commercials keeps favorite documentarians like Pray and Errol Morris financially afloat.)

Naturally, the first "question" afterward came from a well-known Santa Barbara crank, a guy I often see on the bus (where else?) who goes around wearing loud, tucked-in shirts and what I have to believe is the mother of all fanny packs. He bitched and moaned about how the film failed to touch on "the morality" of advertising. Pray handled it well, responding that the issue is an important one, but it's already been explored by such documentaries as The Ad and the Ego. Describing that work's more-polemic-y nature, he added that "it's may be the film you want to see." Because this got a big laugh from the crowd (especially me), Pray added that he wasn't trying to make light of the original question. "Actually, you are," the crank responded, in his cranky way.

This exchange aligns neatly with my developing Grand Theory of Crankdom, which has to do with the intimate correlation of the perception of sprawling, amorphous enemies with total loserhood. Simply put: show me a guy who frequently invokes "corporations," "the government," "the media," etc. as the fount of the world's/his own problems, and I'll show you a guy who's not living the dream. How much of a coincidence could it be that the same guys who cobble together baroque Rube Goldberg explanations of how Nike controls the water supply or how Cheney did 9/11 or how the Kraft/Diebold alliance is even now brainwashing us all are the same ones who scrape by on a combination of the dole and scrap metal sold out of their carport?


Megan Doneman's Yes Madam, Sir chronicles the rise and perennial attempted stifling of the rise of Kiran Bedi, India's first policewoman. (It thus more than qualifies as a documentary about something of which I had little advance knowledge.) It's hugely well-researched and was shot over a period of years and years, which makes it all the more confusing that the end product feels a tad on the thin side, as if ten thousand times the final footage wound up on the cutting room floor. But even as it somewhat stubbily stands, the film is fairly comprehensive, comfortably non-hagiographical and, at the end, delivers a jab at the UN's creaky bureaucracy. Can't ask for much more.


Bent Hamer's O'Horten came as an especially pleasant surprise, given that I sat down knowing only that I found his previous feature Kitchen Stories pleasingly measured and comedically gentle. This new one has already drawn comparisons to Alexander Payne'sAbout Schmidt, which I once heard some comedian describe, astutely, as "a horror movie about not following your dreams." But O'Horten isn't horrific in the least; in fact, it bears little non-superficial resemblance to Schmidt's extended dark night of the soul. It's more like aestheticized realism — which I've come to consider my favorite genre — with the slightest hint of surrealism for tartness. 

Beyond look and feel, the phrase "pleasingly paced and comedically gentle" also suits the wanderings of the 67-year-old newly retired train operator Odd Horten. The aimlessness that befalls him does mirror the one that grips Schmidt after he leaves the actuarial game, but Horten is easygoing affability personified. He's also routinization personified, and without the firm structure of Norway's transportation procedures, he's at loose ends. He goes for a late swim and ends up walking away in a pair of red high heels, he's taken for a "blind drive" by a drunken (but not unimaginative) eccentric, he visits his senile former ski-jumper mom and a little boy forces him to sit at his bedside all night long. As with most films I strongly endorse, however, relating the events of the story tells you absolutely nothing about the gestalt. But know that, of everything I saw at the SBIFF, this was one of the true essentials. 


So-Yong Kim's Treeless Mountain is the other. It nears aesthetic and character-plot balance perfection, but pulls back just enough to give the viewer the perspective of childhood. This works because the protagonists, two young sisters named Bin and Jin, are children themselves. Left in the care of their inattentive, oft-drunk country aunt, the girls dream up ways to fill the piggy bank that their mom promised would, when completely full of coins, bring about her return. Mom is actually off in a distant nowheresville haggling about child support (or something) with the kids' deadbeat dad, which leaves Bin and Jin vast tracts of time (to a little kid's chronological mind) to explore their alien surroundings and execute their moneymaking schemes. At first they get entrepreneurial, roasting grasshoppers and selling them to passing schoolboys. Then wee Bin realizes one can "give one large coin and receive many smaller ones," so they set about packing the pig with small change.

I mentioned the movie's aesthetic skill, but I'm having trouble putting it into words, suffice it to say that the establishing shots alone repay the ticket price. (Festivalticket price.) And if Kim's previous feature In Between Days is half as masterfully paced as Treeless Mountain — spacious enough to allow not just the film but the viewers themselves observe the moment — I'll be rushing it down with all human speed.