Eels – Meet the Eels: Essential Eels Vol. 1 1996-2006 DVD (Geffen Records)
Of the dozen music videos offered on the Essential Eels DVD, perhaps three are worth scrutiny, study. The others are merely, as the Radiohead collection from 1997 reminded us, television commercials for the band. Watching videos like “Rags to Rags” and “Last Stop: This Town”, one has to wonder what the hell the images one is seeing have to do with the music itself. I envision each video’s director explaining in vapid detail what one thing symbolizes or means and how it is connected to the song; and I envision myself disbelieving each director.
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Heima is an Icelandic word meaning “at home.” The epigraph to the 2007 film of that name reads, “Having toured the world over, Sigur Rós return home to play a series of free, unannounced concerts in Iceland.” How one plays an unannounced show with any audience at all besides cast and crew escapes me, but some of shows documented in the film by director Dean DeBlois do look sparsely attended enough to be so. The show in K rahnj kar in support of (and at) the “protest camp” and those protesting the building of the K rahnj kar Hydropower Project – an enormous and expensive dam – and flooding of what singer Jónsi Birgisson calls “The biggest unspoiled highland in Europe” (a fact unverified, as of yet) looked less attended than my circumcision. More than anything the film highlights this ability of the band’s, to be as intimate as an acoustic mountainside show in the Highlands and so massive as to be not multi-national but interstellar, the feeling of traveling in a space so immense it is akin to not moving at all; like Dave’s 2001: A Space Odyssey hurtle through the dark universe of space but not as terrifying – or only occasionally so.
Volver, as seems to be director Pedro Almodovar’s fascination, is a story both hectic and humdrum which, while taut and compelling, is still only impressive window dressing (and that’s no put down) for what is most interesting to Almodovar: relationships between women. (Men are only here to serve as progenitors and/or creeps.) Amongst murder, ghosts, haircuts and dinner, the film’s grandmothers, mothers and daughters gossip, work, laugh about the dead’s flatulence, and so on. Death, in the world of Volver, has little power over the living’s consciousness and habits, and really not much over the dead’s. The film’s opening shot tracks through a cemetery, widows scrubbing their husbands headstones. Death is a chore in this place, and only a hindrance if one allows it to be.
A friend, known as Darko (1), commented on the release of Christopher Guest’s Best in Show in 2000, ‘He hates his characters.’ At the time, and for years hence, it has proved a most astute observation of Guest. Guest’s mockumentary’s do betray a misanthrope intent (and content) on sitting at the cafe and pointing out the faults in all the ‘types’ passing through.
I hadn’t ever voluntary subjected myself to the Dixie Chicks before. I’d heard them through walls or in restaurants or just a capella covers my sister would belt out, but I’d never given them attention. A right lucky thing, too, I found after being drawn in to see Shut Up and Sing. The film’s poster had made it seem it might be some laudable F the Man type propaganda, like the recent The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It was also playing in the local theater, so I was able to eat a pita on the walk over.
It is surely no coincidence that The US vs. John Lennon has been created and released now, in this political climate, a few weeks before elections, for the movie is surely propaganda. A documentary about the political life of John Lennon post-Beatles, the film aims to evince much the same reaction as Fahrenheit 911 or The Daily Show: that is, one of camaraderie with the acerbic tone aimed towards current political and governmental trends.
Science, as defined by the OED, is ‘knowledge acquired by study.’ An interesting premise for a narrative film then, a study of sleep to gather knowledge of it. (One is reminded of Seinfeld’s George Costanza and his original idea for the Jerry sitcom: people driving to work, working, driving home, reading, eating, sleeping, eating again…)
I wish I had been able to watch A Scanner Darkly with more care. That is, I wish there hadn’t been three middle-aged assholes sitting in front of me while I watched it. Having missed the film when it was running in larger theaters I was delighted to see that it was playing at The Cinema, in Rochester. The Cinema is ‘one of the oldest, continuously run, single-screen cinemas in the United States.’1 Sadly, perhaps because you can see a double-feature there for five bucks, The Cinema also attracts a number of film-goers not at all interested in watching movies.
There is something about a film like Quinceañera that you can’t shake off. It doesn’t possess anything immediately compelling: the acting is sometimes a little too self-conscious, the cinematography is nothing to marvel at. And yet, as the story unfolds and weaves the lives of two outcast cousins together with a wise old uncle, one realizes that for all its cinematic shortcomings, Quinceañera’s ambition is to enjoyably evoke the sincerity and honesty in the characters it follows.