The other night, we met the music of two Irish bands in a silent-era theater, boisterous with sounds of pipes, tin whistles, bodhráns, flutes, and guitars...all clashing and weaving amongst the restored chandeliers and flying to us in the balcony, where reels and jigs shook our souls from our boring seats to the aisle frightfully creaking with age. In between, we listed to lilting Celtic accents tell stories--some true, some laced with humorous exaggeration--about where the songs came from, their heritage as important as the notes probably learned by heart.
The night ‘twas my idea (apparently, poorly articulated); I’ve loved Celtic music for years, and one of the bands performing was Lunasa, who’s Merry Sisters of Fate is a favorite. I’ve never seen ‘em live, the best way to experience that music. But I never imagined how much it would hit me that night, and I’m glad I was able to share that with someone who loves Celtic music as much, if not more, than me. Both bands--Dervish and Lunasa--managed to make the night a larceny of expectation.
The funny thing is that I’m not actually Irish, though I’m probably as close as you can get without being one. While my own heritage is Germanic and Scandinavian, many of my family’s friends had Irish blood. I grew up surrounded by Keefes, Sweeneys, and Doughtertys. Several of my own friends wear their Celtic roots proudly, including two of my closest. I live in a small city with a strong Irish American community, complete with two pubs, a couple of annual festivals, and, of course, the occasional Celtic artist selling out the local theater.
So, on St. Patrick’s Day, when Bushwallers overflows with drunken revelers donning bright green teeshirts, plastic bowlers, and ageless gift shop buttons, all I can think about is The Quiet Man.
John Ford’s love letter, as traditional as It’s a Wonderful Life is for Christmas, is an Emerald picture postcard of Ireland, done up Hallmark-style. Americans love their fantasies, and The Quiet Man has them, in charming spades, right up to and including a leprechaun-like matchmaker. But The Quiet Man is an American fairy tale, not an Irish one. Not like another film, John Sayles's quiet The Secret of Roan Inish.
You know how you can tell? The music and the storytelling.
The Quiet Man comes with a Golden Age Hollywood score, with nary a hornpipe to be found. There might be a bagpipe, but I’m not sure. The aforementioned leprechaun delivers the standard, book-ended narration, but remains silent through the film.
Roan Inish, though, mines traditional folk tunes to embroider a story filled with story, told by characters as family history rather than fable. The grandfather exiled from the home of his heart, the cousin "touched" by a legacy that traps him between sea and land...they see a world undone, their family strewn across Ireland in cities and steamshops, broken apart and away from the life they were meant to live. The stories told are sad, rimmed with tragedy, but they are woven with love and longing all the same.
That's Ireland.
It's in their music, their humor, their history. Seanchai are more than simply carriers of heritage--they are the heritage of ancestors. The songs, dancing, and stories are the Irish's connection to their past, but not just the chronological litney of events. Seanchai tell the soul of Ireland.
As Americans, we see fables separate from the lives we wear everyday. Not the Irish, and that's why their culture has become important in my own life. Our existence brims with loved ones, those we know today and those who came before. Celebrate and cherish them, for they are our own magic.
And that's the secret of Roan Inish.
Lunasa played a hornpipe called "The Last Pint" the other night. It was one of the first songs they played together 10 years ago. Almost a lament, it speaks of lovely memories of friends past never forgotten. It was my favorite of the night.
Sláinte.
Friday, March 30, 2007
Sunday, March 18, 2007
Richard Jeni
It was a tough week for B-entertainment.
First, Andy Sidaris, television sports pioneer and silicon-movie maven, succumbed to throat cancer and probably happily joined a gaggle of buxom Valkyries in Vahalla. The next day, John Inman--known best for his role of Mr. "I'm Free!" Humphries on the classic British comedy series "Are You Being Served"--passed on at age 71.
But the one that hurts the most was comedian Richard Jeni, who took his own life last Sunday at age 45.
According to Jeni's family, Richard suffered from "severe clinical depression coupled with bouts of psychotic paranoia." I've had friends who suffer from mental illness, and it's more than a hard thing to live with. As Jeni's tragedy painfully demonstrated, it can take your life.
Sometimes, the ones who make us laugh are the ones with the most pain.
Richard Jeni first came to fame during the stand-up saturation of the early 1990s, when you couldn't find a channel without a comedian dishing some routine. What made Jeni stand above most, however, was his delivery. Nobody was better. If you listened to his jokes, they weren't funny by themselves. Until Richard told 'em. He didn't do anything fancy--he didn't have props, gimmicks, or catchphrases. He simply was your drinking buddy, telling you a funny story while you're watching a boring game with beer and wings. If he had a "gimmick," that was it: he was your friend. Just sit back, listen, and laugh.
Rest in piece, Richard. And thank you.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
REVIEW: Brick
Since the end of black and white, film noir has struggled as a genre. The advent of day-bright Technicolor seemed to mortally dim the genre’s popularity. With its stylish but grim view of humanity, the pure noir film felt tired and out of place during the radical, love-in Sixties. Even when the genre returned during the societal cynicism of the following decade, classics like Chinatown or Point Blank either feel like homages or pale in comparison to the likes of Key Largo, The Big Combo, or Double Indemnity. It’s almost as if the noir film can’t be complete without the visual impact of German Expressionism, lost when movies’ color palate changed from monochrome to a rainbow.
Which makes Brick all that more a pleasant surprise. At first glance yet another high school black comedy/thriller, the film instead is a crackerjack noir flick through and through. It manages to tread carefully among the well-worn archetypes without waylaying into parody or self-awareness, delivering instead a vibrant crime story in the classic form.
The film opens with stillness. A young man is crouched on the edge of a drainage ditch, his hands folded. He is staring at a body of a young woman.
The story cuts back, two days earlier. The young man, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds a note at his locker from his ex-girlfriend Emily, asking him to wait for her call by a pay phone. When he answers, her voice is shaking, hesitant, scared. She’s in trouble, and something frightens her away before she can explain. A mysterious car roars by, and Brendan realizes Emily was just around the corner.
With little to go on other than the scratches Emily blurted out, Brendan begins his search, first going to his informer friend “The Brain” for a direction. During the next several hours, Brendan encounters slightly altered archetypes of old: the siren, lost souls, stylish parties, mysterious notes written in code, whispers of a crime lord. Camera tricks and cinematic style are hurled at you, giftwrapped in clipped, slang-ridden dialog that sounds like the bastard child of Hammett and Hinton. For 20 minutes, Brick fulfills every expectation.
And then writer/director Rian Johnson hits the reset button. The ditch, the body. Brendan suddenly looks up, hears someone in the dark tunnel. And without hesitation, he runs into it.
From that moment on, Brick becomes more than a simple redress of genre tropes. The tunnel is symbolism with a sledgehammer: All bets are off for Brendan, and from this moment forward, he has no idea where his pursuit will end. The neat trick is that the audience doesn’t either. They enter the tunnel with Brendan, suddenly realizing they’ve lost their safety net of assumptions.
Brick manages to keep its crime story vital by populating it with odd, enigmatic characters: Laura the rich girl temptress, Dode the punk-greaser hybrid, Kara the theatrical black widow, Tug the pressure-cooked enforcer, and, especially, The Pin, Brick’s young crime lord-in-the-making. None have a real backstory, not even Brendan. Instead of growing and changing, the characters gradually reveal their true natures, never allowing the audience to come to grips with their first impressions. Each character can find a predecessor from the classic era, but each is slightly translated through the high school environment, providing small, odd, humorous surprises. And that’s where the movie either lives or falters.
When Brick was unleashed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release, it got a good amount of publicity for that high school setting, but in reality, it’s nothing more than seasoning. Instead of tricking out a Heathers clone with hardboiled attributes, Johnson actually does the reverse. He only appropriates the vague outlines of high school drama clichés--the tyrannical assistant principal, the schoolyard brawl, the teen party. He’s simply dropping a noir story into an unexpected setting to see what window dressing changes. Instead of a limo, The Pin cruises around in a plush van. Instead the expected confrontation between the gumshoe and the police, we have the confrontation between Brendan and the vice principal (Richard Roundtree, in a fabulously straight-laced cameo). Although the actors are playing it as if they were living in Mickey Spillane’s universe, the situations themselves become entertainingly absurd because the context is skewed.
This tenuous fantasy Johnson has constructed works only because every player sells it without any wink or nudge. Gordon-Levitt, best known for his work on “3rd Rock from the Sun,” has the toughest assignment--it’s hard to play stone stoic convincingly, but he manages by expressing his emotion subtly through body language. His is a physical performance of limitation, and the rest of cast follows suit. Lukas Haas stands out as The Pin; with his black cape and cane, he projects an aura of quiet menace that imbues his youthful appearance. Noah Fleiss as Tug and Matt O’Leary as the Brain bring a nice touch of humanity to two roles that are more caricature than character, while Emilie de Ravin is suitably vulnerable as Emily. Only Nora Zehetner struggles a bit as the sultry Laura; she’s very good, but she simply isn’t as believable as the others. At times, she almost seems to be playing her role conscientiously rather than disappearing into it.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Brick, however, is the visuals. Whoever led the design--Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, or projection designer Jodie Lynn Tillen--replaced the traditional black and white with a stark but muted look for Brick. Each scene is lit coldly, sometimes dimly, and one color in each setting dominates the others. Combined with the hardboiled style of Johnson’s direction and editing, Brick’s visual sense recalls the visceral garnish of Hong Kong thrillers, dialed down to create an almost benign tension.
In some respects, the film’s style may be too much, at times drowning the characters rather than enhancing them. Laura’s teen party near the beginning is the closest Johnson ever comes to upsetting his delicate universe; Laura’s a rich kid, but her parent’s neo-classical house seems pulled out intact from an affluent speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties, and the high school partiers act as if they belonged more to that decade rather than the current one. It’s the only time in the film where the characters’ age clashes with the story’s tone, and the result rings false. Other situations work because they exist purely in the high school environment, creating a believable foundation for the young characters, but the film teeters on cracking it with what is probably an ill-advised homage.
But with few real missteps, Brick remains one of those cinematic oddities--a unified vision that transforms a gimmick into genuine personal expression. Johnson obviously loves these stories, and his cast and crew crafted more than a tribute to a nearly lost genre; they’ve created the real thing. With a slight twist. The end result is unique and old school all at once, and that’s something as rare as noir itself.
---
Film Information
Year Released: 2005
Director: Rian Johnson
Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss
Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brick/trailer/
Which makes Brick all that more a pleasant surprise. At first glance yet another high school black comedy/thriller, the film instead is a crackerjack noir flick through and through. It manages to tread carefully among the well-worn archetypes without waylaying into parody or self-awareness, delivering instead a vibrant crime story in the classic form.
The film opens with stillness. A young man is crouched on the edge of a drainage ditch, his hands folded. He is staring at a body of a young woman.
The story cuts back, two days earlier. The young man, Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), finds a note at his locker from his ex-girlfriend Emily, asking him to wait for her call by a pay phone. When he answers, her voice is shaking, hesitant, scared. She’s in trouble, and something frightens her away before she can explain. A mysterious car roars by, and Brendan realizes Emily was just around the corner.
With little to go on other than the scratches Emily blurted out, Brendan begins his search, first going to his informer friend “The Brain” for a direction. During the next several hours, Brendan encounters slightly altered archetypes of old: the siren, lost souls, stylish parties, mysterious notes written in code, whispers of a crime lord. Camera tricks and cinematic style are hurled at you, giftwrapped in clipped, slang-ridden dialog that sounds like the bastard child of Hammett and Hinton. For 20 minutes, Brick fulfills every expectation.
And then writer/director Rian Johnson hits the reset button. The ditch, the body. Brendan suddenly looks up, hears someone in the dark tunnel. And without hesitation, he runs into it.
From that moment on, Brick becomes more than a simple redress of genre tropes. The tunnel is symbolism with a sledgehammer: All bets are off for Brendan, and from this moment forward, he has no idea where his pursuit will end. The neat trick is that the audience doesn’t either. They enter the tunnel with Brendan, suddenly realizing they’ve lost their safety net of assumptions.
Brick manages to keep its crime story vital by populating it with odd, enigmatic characters: Laura the rich girl temptress, Dode the punk-greaser hybrid, Kara the theatrical black widow, Tug the pressure-cooked enforcer, and, especially, The Pin, Brick’s young crime lord-in-the-making. None have a real backstory, not even Brendan. Instead of growing and changing, the characters gradually reveal their true natures, never allowing the audience to come to grips with their first impressions. Each character can find a predecessor from the classic era, but each is slightly translated through the high school environment, providing small, odd, humorous surprises. And that’s where the movie either lives or falters.
When Brick was unleashed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical release, it got a good amount of publicity for that high school setting, but in reality, it’s nothing more than seasoning. Instead of tricking out a Heathers clone with hardboiled attributes, Johnson actually does the reverse. He only appropriates the vague outlines of high school drama clichés--the tyrannical assistant principal, the schoolyard brawl, the teen party. He’s simply dropping a noir story into an unexpected setting to see what window dressing changes. Instead of a limo, The Pin cruises around in a plush van. Instead the expected confrontation between the gumshoe and the police, we have the confrontation between Brendan and the vice principal (Richard Roundtree, in a fabulously straight-laced cameo). Although the actors are playing it as if they were living in Mickey Spillane’s universe, the situations themselves become entertainingly absurd because the context is skewed.
This tenuous fantasy Johnson has constructed works only because every player sells it without any wink or nudge. Gordon-Levitt, best known for his work on “3rd Rock from the Sun,” has the toughest assignment--it’s hard to play stone stoic convincingly, but he manages by expressing his emotion subtly through body language. His is a physical performance of limitation, and the rest of cast follows suit. Lukas Haas stands out as The Pin; with his black cape and cane, he projects an aura of quiet menace that imbues his youthful appearance. Noah Fleiss as Tug and Matt O’Leary as the Brain bring a nice touch of humanity to two roles that are more caricature than character, while Emilie de Ravin is suitably vulnerable as Emily. Only Nora Zehetner struggles a bit as the sultry Laura; she’s very good, but she simply isn’t as believable as the others. At times, she almost seems to be playing her role conscientiously rather than disappearing into it.
Perhaps the greatest strength of Brick, however, is the visuals. Whoever led the design--Johnson, cinematographer Steve Yedlin, or projection designer Jodie Lynn Tillen--replaced the traditional black and white with a stark but muted look for Brick. Each scene is lit coldly, sometimes dimly, and one color in each setting dominates the others. Combined with the hardboiled style of Johnson’s direction and editing, Brick’s visual sense recalls the visceral garnish of Hong Kong thrillers, dialed down to create an almost benign tension.
In some respects, the film’s style may be too much, at times drowning the characters rather than enhancing them. Laura’s teen party near the beginning is the closest Johnson ever comes to upsetting his delicate universe; Laura’s a rich kid, but her parent’s neo-classical house seems pulled out intact from an affluent speakeasy of the Roaring Twenties, and the high school partiers act as if they belonged more to that decade rather than the current one. It’s the only time in the film where the characters’ age clashes with the story’s tone, and the result rings false. Other situations work because they exist purely in the high school environment, creating a believable foundation for the young characters, but the film teeters on cracking it with what is probably an ill-advised homage.
But with few real missteps, Brick remains one of those cinematic oddities--a unified vision that transforms a gimmick into genuine personal expression. Johnson obviously loves these stories, and his cast and crew crafted more than a tribute to a nearly lost genre; they’ve created the real thing. With a slight twist. The end result is unique and old school all at once, and that’s something as rare as noir itself.
---
Film Information
Year Released: 2005
Director: Rian Johnson
Main Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Lukas Haas, Nora Zehetner, Noah Fleiss
Trailer: http://www.apple.com/trailers/focus_features/brick/trailer/
Thursday, March 08, 2007
No Better Time Than the...Whoops
So, here we are.
Looks different ’round the old place, doesn’t it? Something had to change; three posts in two years isn’t exactly buzzing the ether. Blogging just isn’t my well-used bag, unfortunately. I’ve never kept a diary, and any writing journal I managed to maintain served more as a testing ground for story figments, fragments, and remnants. Although I am a windbag of the Uilleann pipes variety, I need an audience to engage, and a message board is a far better place for that crime than a blog. Combine all that with knack for privacy, and you have a tailor-made digital cubicle for cobwebs. A decision about the Parking Lot needed to be made.
Thus, welcome to my movie blog. Sad, I know.
In light of last year’s post, the switch to film flam commentary and reviews may seem odd. But I realized something about myself: I can talk about anything, but I love talking movies the most. Heck, my last two entries were movie-related. When you love something, the work of writing transforms to joy, and that includes reviewing. Too many critics believe in their title too much; instead of watching a film for pleasure and simply conveying to readers what worked and didn’t work, they enter darkened theaters with dread, their critical mind firing on all cylinders before the first trailer rolls. Which probably is why critics get paid for their work--for them, there’s no fun to be had anymore.
Well, I’m having fun now. Since my “revelation” last year, I cut back the Netflix subscription and watched whatever smacked my fancy. Movies hiding at the bottom of my cedar chest found their way out of the dust to my DVD player. Big Trouble in Little China, Rock and Rule, Mannequin, Still Breathing, The Shawshank Redemption, Equilibrium, Sherlock Jr., The Thin Man, Bubba Ho-Tep, Murder by Decree—all movies that, in their own unique madness, managed to fix a smile on my face. I can recognize their faults, but I also can recognize why, for me, those faults simply make the movie more endearing and immediate. Perfect imperfection, the blessing of the indie and B-movie.
I love movies, especially little ones that ambush you from the commercial fringe. I want you to know about them, and I want you know why those strange flickering images are so important. So, I’m trying again, for the joy of it. Besides, a beautiful woman talked me back into it, and I’m a sucker for beautiful women. Especially ones with cattle prods.
Anyone got any Bactine?
Looks different ’round the old place, doesn’t it? Something had to change; three posts in two years isn’t exactly buzzing the ether. Blogging just isn’t my well-used bag, unfortunately. I’ve never kept a diary, and any writing journal I managed to maintain served more as a testing ground for story figments, fragments, and remnants. Although I am a windbag of the Uilleann pipes variety, I need an audience to engage, and a message board is a far better place for that crime than a blog. Combine all that with knack for privacy, and you have a tailor-made digital cubicle for cobwebs. A decision about the Parking Lot needed to be made.
Thus, welcome to my movie blog. Sad, I know.
In light of last year’s post, the switch to film flam commentary and reviews may seem odd. But I realized something about myself: I can talk about anything, but I love talking movies the most. Heck, my last two entries were movie-related. When you love something, the work of writing transforms to joy, and that includes reviewing. Too many critics believe in their title too much; instead of watching a film for pleasure and simply conveying to readers what worked and didn’t work, they enter darkened theaters with dread, their critical mind firing on all cylinders before the first trailer rolls. Which probably is why critics get paid for their work--for them, there’s no fun to be had anymore.
Well, I’m having fun now. Since my “revelation” last year, I cut back the Netflix subscription and watched whatever smacked my fancy. Movies hiding at the bottom of my cedar chest found their way out of the dust to my DVD player. Big Trouble in Little China, Rock and Rule, Mannequin, Still Breathing, The Shawshank Redemption, Equilibrium, Sherlock Jr., The Thin Man, Bubba Ho-Tep, Murder by Decree—all movies that, in their own unique madness, managed to fix a smile on my face. I can recognize their faults, but I also can recognize why, for me, those faults simply make the movie more endearing and immediate. Perfect imperfection, the blessing of the indie and B-movie.
I love movies, especially little ones that ambush you from the commercial fringe. I want you to know about them, and I want you know why those strange flickering images are so important. So, I’m trying again, for the joy of it. Besides, a beautiful woman talked me back into it, and I’m a sucker for beautiful women. Especially ones with cattle prods.
Anyone got any Bactine?
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