Splendor sine occasu
The Pacific Northwest – this continent's best and most beautiful corner (but I'm biased) – elementally condensed into six splendid minutes.
I feel old...
Oh my god, I really can't believe this album is 25 years old!! (This blog is only six years its junior.)
What a nice birthday gift – an uncommonly excellent covers collection!
Maybe I will always slightly prefer the rawer Call the Doctor, and in certain moods the wearier One Beat, but this in retrospect is unmistakably the S-K album, most of all for the serendipitous addition of Janet, perfecting their signature aesthetic, and also for the last unequivocal gasp of a boundless, youthful energy that sounds like lightning in a bottle. As Robert Christgau very aptly put it at the time, "One reason you know they're young is that they obviously believe they can rock and roll at this pitch forever." Then three years later, Greil Marcus named them America's best rock band. He was right about that, and I'd go one further to say that, for my money anyway, the Corin-Carrie-Janet S-K were the best US rock group ever, period. Emphasis on group. Words and guitar. And guitar. And drums! (The last record sans Janet just wasn't the same, sadly.) Dig Me Out was where all of that really came together, taking on its electrifying adamantine form, shining and sharpening Call the Doctor's murkier, rougher edges and propelling its upfront duo into a kind of sonic bliss in aporetic tension with the anxious drama of their voices, words, half-articulated doubts and desires.
Accordingly everyone's on their A-game here to pay proper tribute: all good, most very good, a few great in their own right. Of particular note: Wilco's wonderful cover is a good reminder that "One More Hour" is one of the best love songs ever written. Husband and wife Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires play "Not What You Want" like it's an outlaw anthem. And Black Belt Eagle Scout's simmering, sultry take on "It's Enough" – Dig Me In's overall standout track, despite being only the sixth- or seventh-best song on Dig Me Out – fortunately led me to her two terrific LPs, some of the best new music I'd neglected to hear while relistening ad infinitum to my favourite albums of yesteryear (or covers thereof). You know, like old people do.
Plus deux 
Two days before the end of 2022, and two weeks or so after posting my top ten/eleven here (as solid as any year's list in recent memory), I just caught two of the three best new movies that I saw all year: Charlotte Wells' Aftersun and Jafar Panahi's No Bears. The former is an astonishing debut feature, the latter the greatest film in nearly two decades by an irrepressible master still courageously fighting the good fight. Both feel deeply haunted by the ambiguous, potentially unsettling power of captured images, sounds, moments. While the current vogue for autofiction/docufiction/metafiction (bolstered by years of Covid tedium) may at this point be yielding diminishing returns, Wells and Panahi have crafted indelible and impactful experiments that thoroughly justify their self-reflexive conceits.
2022: Top Ten (or Eleven) Movies
01. Benediction (Davies)
The greatest film to date by one of the world's half-dozen or so greatest living filmmakers; a truly monumental work.
The subjective thought-world of earlier medieval northern Europe has never been presented so vividly and so immersively on screen.
03. R.M.N. (Mungiu)
A grim and haunting microcosmic snapshot of Europe right now.
04. Tár (Field)
Kubrick by way of P.T. Anderson, Citizen Kane by way of The Social Network, The Great Gatsby by way of The House of Mirth. #MeToo? Cancel culture? Identity politics versus the transcendent value of Great Art? Hey, man – he just plays the piano.
I laughed, I cried, I laughed some more, I went home and spent the rest of the evening browsing Irish vacation deals.
06. The Fabelmans (Spielberg) &
Armageddon Time (Gray) [tie]
Portraits of the artists as young men: the year's most perfect double feature.
No less sentimental, tender, and expertly crafted than the Spielberg, Kore-eda is trying to break our hearts. The odd non-parent might make it out in one piece; those of us with kids we love don't stand a chance.
The most generous and humane film of the year.
09. Three Thousand Years of Longing (Miller)
If romantic escapism, broad laughs, special effects, and wholly unsubtle eye-candy production design are what still sell big-screen theatre tickets, then Miller's marvellous A.S. Byatt filmization should've been the year's top-grossing movie. Pure fun start-to-finish, it's something like the Back to the Future of Orientalist fantasy epics.
10. Pacifiction (Serra)
Somehow it gets better – and stranger – every time I think back to it. Now two months removed, I can't shake it and I can't wait to see it again – in a better and more just world, projected in IMAX!
Idolatry
I appreciate the idea, but disagree significantly with his ordering and picks, while nonetheless still loving most of them – which says a lot about the exceptional and consistently excellent quality of CRJ's catalogue at this point!
Here's my 37, fresh off a fantastic concert and a new album that I was slightly lukewarm on at first but find more to enjoy and admire each time I play it:
01. "No Drug Like Me"
02. "Run Away with Me"
03. "Tiny Little Bows" (Green Couch Session version)
04. "Curiosity" (EP version)
05. "Want You in My Room"
02. "Run Away with Me"
03. "Tiny Little Bows" (Green Couch Session version)
04. "Curiosity" (EP version)
05. "Want You in My Room"
06. "Your Type"
07. "L.A. Hallucinations"
08. "Talking to Yourself"
09. "Too Much"
10. "This Kiss"
07. "L.A. Hallucinations"
08. "Talking to Yourself"
09. "Too Much"
10. "This Kiss"
11. "Summer Love"
12. "Making the Most of the Night"
12. "Making the Most of the Night"
13. "All That"
14. "Emotion"
15. "Stay Away"
16. "Far Away"
17. "Surrender My Heart"
18. "Boy Problems"
19. "Cry"
20. "When I Needed You"
21. "Tiny Little Bows" (Kiss version)
17. "Surrender My Heart"
18. "Boy Problems"
19. "Cry"
20. "When I Needed You"
21. "Tiny Little Bows" (Kiss version)
22. "Curiosity" (Kiss version)
23. "Cut to the Feeling"
24. "This Love Isn't Crazy"
25. "The Sound"
24. "This Love Isn't Crazy"
25. "The Sound"
26. "Let's Get Lost"
27. "Gimmie Love"
27. "Gimmie Love"
28. "Beach House"
29. "Warm Blood"
29. "Warm Blood"
30. "First Time"
31. "I Didn't Just Come Here to Dance"
32. "Bends"
33. "Higher"
32. "Bends"
33. "Higher"
34. "Tonight I'm Getting over You"
35. "Comeback"
36. "Bad Thing Twice"
37. "Tug of War"
36. "Bad Thing Twice"
37. "Tug of War"
Top Ten Documentaries
I'm sure I'm momentarily blanking on some –– and I've omitted here hybrid-/quasi-docs by Godard, Welles, Malick, Kiarostami, Panahi, et al. in favour of more conventional, clear-cut documentaries –– but off the top of my head:
01. Shoah (Lanzmann)
02. The Sorrow and the Pity (Ophuls)
03. Karamay (Xu)
04. Night and Fog (Resnais)
05. Into Great Silence (Gröning)
06. How to Survive a Plague (France)
07. Hoop Dreams (James)
08. When the Levees Broke (Lee) + OJ: Made in America (Edelman) [tie]
09. Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Obomsawin)
10. Lost Course (Li)
Fuck Kyrie Irving, the spot-on sports doppelgänger of Kanye West (hypertalented at exactly one thing, dangerously and recklessly terrible in every other respect that matters), but, to our knowledge, without the mitigating circumstances of mental-health problems. Fuck Ime Udoka, who the Celtics had the fortitude to suspend for a whole season despite having reached the Finals in his first season. And fuck the cynical, gutless, morally bankrupt Brooklyn Nets team and organization, which in its current incarnation is by far the most repugnant NBA team during my lifetime of following basketball. Steve Nash should count his blessings for being booted from this amoral shitshow.
Loneliest Midnights
For connoisseurs of melodic dreamy/witty/wistful tunes by female singer-songwriters/pop stars (sometimes by turns, sometimes at once) with impeccable, if not infallible, instincts for album-length Quality Control, Oct. 20 was a veritable holiday. Friday delivered terrific new records by Taylor Swift and Carly Rae Jepsen, two of the very best in the game. Doing most of the things she's done best, or even borderline-perfected, over nine (!) prior albums but here generously packed into a single, coherent LP (esp. the extended "3 AM" edition), TS has made something like a Greatest Hits You've Never Heard Before, nearly every track rating in the upper percentiles of her now-sprawling song catalogue and some of them ("Anti-Hero," "Vigilante Shit," "Labyrinth," "Lavender Haze") registering as instant classics. To my tastes, it's her best album since her decisive pop shift; and while I might always harbour a softer spot for "Our Song," "Tim McGraw," and "Teardrops on My Guitar," Midnights might well be the strongest front-to-back record of her career to date.
Not so CRJ's The Loneliest Time, a slightly spottier collection than her preceding albums (including the excellent and essential ostensible B-side releases). Yet what the album –– notwithstanding a few skippable tracks that might yet grow on me –– very impressively demonstrates is the surprising width and breadth of CRJ's 80's-inspired pop palette. The best songs here ("Far Away," "Beach House," "Surrender My Heart," "Bends") are not Emotion or Dedicated redux, but rather yield new colours (still mainly a mix of neons and pastels despite what the autumnal album cover suggests), new sounds, new flavours, moods, and ideas.
VIFF 2022: Best of the Fest
01. R.M.N. (Mungiu)
02. Broker (Kore-eda)
03. The Blue Caftan (Touzani)
04. Plan 75 (Hayakawa)
05. Pacifiction (Serra)
06. Triangle of Sadness (Östlund)
07. Septet: The Story of Hong Kong (Hui, Hung, Lam, Tam, To, Tsui, Wo)
08. The Grizzlie Truth (Jayme)
09. The Forger (Peren)
10. Stars at Noon (Denis)
A Woman in Trouble
Bizarro film maudit, messy minor masterpiece, or maybe both at once, Andrew Dominik's anti-biopic would if nothing else pass with flying colours David Letterman's "Is This Anything?" test. It is absolutely and unmistakably something, even if, one might reasonably argue, it has only slightly more to do with Norma Jeane Baker née Mortenson than, say, Gus Van Sant's Last Days had to do with Kurt Cobain. The narrative momentum of both films is propelled forward by something like Freud's death drive, though in Blonde the race to the grave is stopped and stalled and sporadically rerouted by weird variations on the pleasure principle and an Electra Complex literalized ad nauseam. While David Lynch's films may be read profitably as grotesque/sublime Francis Bacon-esque reservoirs of Freudian signification, Dominik pushes that symbolism further still, in search of...well, what exactly?
I'm not sure that Dominik is sure any more than the real Norma Jeane was ever very sure of what it was she wanted out of Marilyn Monroe, life, or her various relationships. But she was a fantastic actress, both comic and dramatic (see esp. her thoroughly wrenching work in The Misfits!). She wasn't ever only an iconic pop-cultural cipher. Dominik ungenerously short-changes her in this crucial regard. Thankfully Ana de Armas recognizes Monroe's sparkling performative brilliance and with her wholly embodied Norma Jeane/Marilyn rediviva(e) heroically saves this movie from an abyss of sadistic, misogynistic cruelty to which Lynch's work has also at times veered dangerously and discomfitingly close. Instead, our hearts break again and again for de Armas-as-Norma-Jeane-as-Marilyn –– and not least in the otherwise profoundly stupid JFK scene. Adam Nayman writes that "in terms of sheer, visceral unpleasantness, Blonde has nothing on Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me." He may be right about that, but let's hope it doesn't take critics and other discerning viewers quite as long to catch up to the perverse charms and merits of Blonde as it did for Lynch's most misjudged great film to begin to get its due.
IN MEMORIAM
Just by coincidence last night I re-read Jonathan Rosenbaum's essay "A Cinema of Uncertainty: Films by Michelangelo Antonioni" (1993). At the beginning of this piece, Rosenbaum names the twelve greatest directors in the world, "not so much personal favorites as individuals who, in [his] estimation, have done the most to change the way we perceive the world and are likeliest to be remembered and valued half a century from now." It struck me that of the dozen men cited twenty-nine nears ago only two remained living.
And now, sadly, just one (Hou Hsiao-hsien).
When, nineteen years ago, I created this blog, I chose Jean-Luc Godard as half its namesake not because he was my personal favourite director, but rather because – apart from sharing two-thirds of my initials – Godard seemed to me the quintessential brilliant, prickly, serious, artistic filmmaker. I had sought out aggressively every Godard movie I could find (then, mostly through Ebay, snatching up VHS tapes and bootleg discs), seen probably 15 or so, and just read Colin MacCabe's Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at Seventy, which cemented my impression of this iconoclastic giant of post-war European art. I was an admirer and a convert.
For still younger generations who regard cinema/cinephilia as much as a religion (encompassing art, politics, history, philosophy, almost all facets of life) as did Godard's Nouvelle Vague peers, JLG was something of a mythic high priest. Yet, unlike many revered elderly figureheads, Godard remained utterly vital to the last, creating a series of astonishing films in the twenty-first century that rival or surpass his more famous '60s heyday. 2001's Éloge de l'amour, the first in that late-career renaissance, was one of the first movies I ever wrote about at length – a review that, evidently, has mercifully vanished from the memory of the Internet.
While I don't necessarily agree with the logic of Rosenbaum's above-quoted criteria for defining the world's greatest filmmakers, it certainly fits for Godard. He has genuinely and significantly impacted the way that I, and many other people, perceive the world; and there is no doubt at all that his name, reputation, and oeuvre will endure –– far beyond a mere half-century.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
This year's EuroBasket has been terrific! Such high-level, intensely competitive basketball, nearly every game – much more so, in fact, than many early-to-mid NBA regular season games, which are sometimes phoned in or missed entirely by stars given time off for rest.
One could argue, too, that Eurobasket 2022 included the three best players in the world right now at this moment, although Jokić/Serbia was knocked out by Italy in a super exciting game earlier today. But, as I write this post, we could still very conceivably end up with a Giannis vs. Luka championship game a week from now!
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