VIFF 2020: Best of the Fest

01.  Moving On (Yoon) 

02.  There Is No Evil (Rasoulof)

03.  Twilight's Kiss (Yeung)

04.  Servants (Ostrochovsky)

05.  My Rembrandt (Hoogendijk) 

06.  Undine (Petzold)

07.  Memories to Choke On, Drinks to Wash Them Down (Leung/Reilly)

08.  Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis (Wagner)

09.  Summer of 85 (Ozon)

10.  Hammamet (Amelio) 

   VIFF 2020, pt. 3:  You Can't Go Home Again                                           

Twilight's Kiss  The loveliest film at this year's festival, and one of the loveliest, period in an awfully long time, is Ray Yeung's romantic portrait of two Hong Kong seniors, a taxi driver with a wife and adult children and a retired divorcé whose son has convinced him to convert to Christianity. The former secretly cruises for furtive encounters with other men; the latter is more integrated into Hong Kong's community of gay older men, though he is careful to keep this important part of his life and identity concealed from his family. What is initially a chance encounter develops into something far more meaningful and impactful for both men. Yet, as their relationship progresses and deepens, even the sweetness and joy of shared moments are strained with the weight of secrecy and regret. As a swooning, circumstantially doomed, romance, there are some echoes here of In the Mood for Love, another great Hong Kong film––but Yeung's love story, of two men in the autumn of their lives, is a very different one. The social and personal factors that constrain the full flowering of their relationship are markedly different, too. And, in contrast to Wong Kar-wai's eye-poppingly stylish '60s Hong Kong, Yeung's representation of the contemporary city feels more lived-in and open. The elegant period elements in Wong's tightly constructed film converge in on his lovers, and seem to exist for them and their ephemeral moment of connection. In Twilight's Kiss, Yeung's couple are just people living ordinary lives surrounded by many others doing the same. Their relationship adds an intense charge of feeling that is theirs alone. The world around them keeps going on at its normal rate and rhythm, as other people, including their families and friends (all presented as complex, interesting individuals, none of them mere foils for or accessories to the lead characters), have other experiences, feelings, and relationships.

Hammamet  The consistently superb Pierfrancesco Favino gives another astonishing performance, here as notorious Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi. Gianni Amelio's film focuses primarily on the final years of Craxi's life, after he had fled Italy for the titular town in Tunisia to avoid facing trial on corruption charges. This abbreviated biographical scope allows for an unhurried rhythm and long, patient scenes centering on extended dialogues between Craxi and his visitors. As in Suburra and Bellocchio's The Traitor, Favino is considerably stronger than the rest of the movie playing out around him, but given Amelio's near-constant focus on Craxi –– a kind of disgraced lion-in-winter figure  –- Favino's tour de force performance very nearly is the film, together with some stunning scenic backdrops on both sides of the Mediterranean. 

John Ware Reclaimed  This passion project of novelist/playwright/documentarian Cheryl Foggo illuminates a thoroughly interesting and significant chapter of Canadian – or really, North American – history that deserves to be better known: that of an African-American man who, after the U.S. Civil War, ventured to Canada and became a successful and prominent Prairie rancher. For Foggo, her brother, and other African-Canadians she interviews, Ware's legacy is distinctly personal. With a good historian's resourcefulness and tenacity, Foggo endeavours to push past the vague legend of "Alberta's Black Cowboy," to learn more about Ware, his family, community, and social context, and to share widely what she discovers so as to dispel the notion that Canada, and particularly Western Canada, is lacking in Black History. 

My Mexican Bretzel  Like, say, Tarnation, Stories We Tell, and Dawson City: Frozen Time –– films that seemingly share little in common ––  Nuria Giménez's found-footage montage (for lack of a more precise definition; it's borderline sui generis) is a remarkably clever piece of storytelling assembled out of fragmentary shards of the past; moments richly evocative and mundane stitched together as a kind of diaristic narrative. It's as much a "documentary" as F for Fake, but Giménez plays it much straighter than Welles, and the cumulative effect of her film is genuinely haunting, whatever its other claims to "authenticity." If nothing else, this is another illustrative reminder of just how irrelevant the conventional binary of "documentary" and "fiction" has become – if it wasn't already so back in Welles's heyday. 

Moving On  Yoon Dan-bi's quietly excellent family drama is one of the great surprises of this year's festival. Yoon and her wonderfully naturalistic cast capture in such subtle and exacting detail the dynamics within a family, whether in group dinners and celebrations or in small, one-on-one moments between, say, an aunt and her niece or an adult brother and sister both going through tough times. There is a rather obvious impulse to situate Moving On within the illustrious and extensive tradition of the Asian family drama, from Ozu to Hou to Koreeda (all three auteurs are mentioned in the festival catalogue blurb!). However, the movie that most immediately came to mind for me was You Can Count on Me. In its tenderness, warmth, humour, and real empathy, so many scenes in Yoon's film recalled that indelible last scene in Lonergan's, with Laura Linney's Sammy saying a reluctant goodbye-for-now to Mark Ruffalo's Terry (neither actor has been better before or since). Moving On's final moments are no less poignant, though they're so much sadder because it's goodbye-for-good, and in more ways than one. 

Mickey on the Road  It's a bit of a shame, really, that I happened to watch Lu Mian Mian's entirely solid and occasionally inspired film right after seeing Moving On. Mickey on the Road –– a road-trip drama/comedy about two young women who travel together from Taiwan to Guangzhou, though for different reasons –– is probably not overly melodramatic or excessively aesthetically showy, yet it seemed to be both after the masterful subtlety of Yoon's film. And while Lu's work is, at times, quite funny, its laughs felt somewhat forced and too self-consciously quirky compared to the wholly organic humour of Moving On. That is to say, it's not Mickey on the Road's fault that I'm exceptionally smitten with Moving On (even more so after a follow-up viewing, post-Mickey). To be sure, Lu's movie has plenty to recommend it, including a pair of charismatic lead performances and some really rich and fascinating insights about cultural differences between Taiwan and the southern (Cantonese) Mainland. But watching some dozen and a half movies over just a couple weeks' time ultimately, emphatically underscores the differences that separate great films from good ones. Where Mickey on the Road feels through and through like a promising feature debut, Moving On is a first feature that is almost unbelievably assured and mature. 

VIFF 2020, pt. 2: Stately horrors 

 

There Is No Evil  The English title of Mohammad Rasoulof's film –– its original Persian title translates literally as "Satan doesn't exist" –– evokes, coincidentally or not, Hannah Arendt's famous notion of the "banality of evil." Without giving away too much about this masterpiece in four movements (it's really best to go in with as little advance knowledge as possible), suffice it to say that each of the four, thematically linked stories explores what it means to do evil, to effect it in the world, as well as the mystery of its true source or nature if men are only banal part-time conduits for the doing of evil. Does this elusiveness then mean that evil, or "Satan," doesn't actually exist? Is it a mere by-product of the impersonal operations of the State? Rasoulof's film, though occasionally a touch too didactic, mostly resists supplying any easy answers to such thorny questions. What it shows across its four acts is a world fatally scarred by the terrible things people have done to one another, however banal, unintentional, or unwilling those actions. 

Servants  Ivan Ostrochovsky's stunning, noir-influenced film is similarly, though more immediately, concerned with the power of the state over the moral and spiritual lives of its citizens. The setting here, rather than present-day Iran, is Czechoslakia in 1980, as the totalitarian communist government attempts to root out resistance within the Catholic Church, specifically in a Bratislava seminary where some teachers and pupils have expressed criticism of the state-sponsored Pacem in Terris movement. In Ostrochovsky's vision of the past, this historical milieu is a strange and ghostly space shot through with dread; a soul-crushing, Kafka-esque nightmare. Yet, there is a stark beauty and a sense of mystery within every monochrome frame. The spiritual tumult of the young priests-in-training and their aged ecclesiastical mentors is most evocatively expressed in Servants' many moments of eerie calm, only barely suppressing the profound anxiety just below the surface. 

Merkel – Anatomy of a Crisis Centering on Angela Merkel's bold and fateful decision to allow hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees to enter and seek asylum in Germany, Stephen Wagner's film focuses, above all, on the long period of indecision and the behind-the-scenes bureaucratic wrangling and maneuvering that led up to Merkel's eventual, humane stance. It's a political thriller of sorts, but one concerned with the place (or possibility) of morality and empathy in a world of Realpolitik pragmatism and micromanaged economic minutiae. As Merkel, Imogen Kogge is excellent, transcending mere impersonation, and the rest of the cast is nearly as strong. Though Wagner's style is rather pedestrian and clearly televisual, his vocabulary of rapid cuts between scenes and locales, frequent establishing shots of European capital cities, and news footage mixed in with terse conversations in state offices, cars, and via phone meetings feels perfectly pitched as an aesthetic representing the complicated governmental and intergovernmental strata of present-day Germany and the E.U.

The Town of Headcounts Shinji Araki's film, an odd mix of drama, comedy, and science fiction, plays like an especially clever episode of Black Mirror, but situated within the specific context of Japanese society. It's a dystopian tale of a cult-like community that provides a life of dull leisure for its trapped members, who are then supplied as "headcounts" for various corporate or political ends necessitating the anonymous presence of crowds of people. While this premise sounds convoluted on paper, it largely works in practice, particularly because the cast is equally good in comic circumstances and in the film's darker moments. The most unnerving aspect of Araki's work is that its dystopia exists within normal reality and contemporary society, albeit at its creepy, invisible margins, not far off in some distant future. 

Special Actors Shin'ichirô Ueda's movie shares some conspicuous similarities with Araki's: namely, a weird cult and the use of ordinary people as performative props inserted purposefully into certain real-world situations. Both films are also critiques of certain aspects of Japanese culture (though, as such, I can't pretend to be able to fully "read" them). Ueda's work, however, is a much broader, zanier comedy. The "special actors" of the title are amateur performers hired to add some movie-like excitement to regular life. One "actor," for instance, is tasked with threatening a customer and then taking a fake beating so that said customer can impress his date. In the main storyline, the stakes are higher: the team of "special actors" are hired by the sister of a brainwashed inn owner to infiltrate a Scientology-like group in order to prevent the group from taking possession of her family's inn. Much silliness ensues, some of it a bit tedious. But with Ueda's light, screwball touch, it's mostly a lot of fun. 

Last and First Men Of all the movies at this year's festival that have suffered unfairly from the indignity of being streamed off a laptop to a TV, the late Jóhann Jóhansson's deep-future time-capsule might be the worst served by this virtual fest format. Tilda Swinton narrates a message addressed to us  from a future race of man (the 18th; we're still the first) some two billion years in the future, reflecting on the end of their own Neptune-based civilization, over long-held black-and-white shots of brutalist futuristic structures and cryptic monuments now in a state of ruin. It's at times hypnotic, at times boring. But I suspect the former impression would dominate were this projected on a proper movie screen –– or better yet, presented as an art-gallery installation, where this really belongs, partitioned off in a dark, quiet space amidst the mixed, strange fruits of human imagination. 

Sanzaru For horror connoisseurs like us, too many horror movies – including many good ones – are thoroughly predictable from about ten minutes in, their characters all stock types, the scares pro forma. Xia Magnus's film, about a Filipina nurse and her nephew residing with a terminally ill older woman and her son at a house in rural Texas, is refreshingly inscrutable through much of its runtime. While this haunted-house story ultimately hits some familiar horror notes, its patient plotting helps to build thick atmosphere, interesting, multi-dimensional characters, and general goodwill. More unsettling than jump-scary, Sanzaru is a slow burn that gradually worms its way under one's skin.

The Curse of Willow Song Far less successfully, Karen Lam's Vancouver-set feature aims, at once, for horror, neo-noir, and gritty social realism. It misses all these targets, but it falls especially short on the last one. Perhaps non-Vancouverites won't mind (or even notice), but, speaking as a longtime resident of the city, Lam's representations of the Downtown Eastside and some kind of vague, shadowy Lower Mainland criminal underworld feel really off-base and simplistic. (This is just local nitpicking, but at one point a character is picked up on the DTES, the driver seems to drive south across the Second Narrows Bridge, and they end up at an industrial park that is said to be in Surrey...) Willow Song's guiding template seems to be Sin City, or something of that sort. In consequence, the film's depictions of serious social issues like drug addiction, homelessness, sexual harassment, and the difficulty of life after prison are regrettably cartoonish. There is some good stuff here: the b&w photography looks sharp (again, it would benefit much from the big screen); Valerie Tian's lead performance is solid, relatively subtle, and gets better as the film goes along; and the horror special effects are pretty impressive for a low-budget indie. But these bright spots are just not enough to make up for all the ways this movie goes wrong. 

VIFF 2020, pt. 1: Lieux de mémoire

Undine Christian Petzold's latest abounds with strange pleasures small and large, from an indelible re-appropriation of "Stayin' Alive" to Paula Beer's magnetic, mercurial performance as the tellingly named title character, a freelance historian specializing in the politics of architecture and urban planning in Berlin. Employed at a museum of miniature models of the city, Undine's impeccably detailed and highly sophisticated presentations for tour groups seemingly fit quite comfortably with Petzold's recurring preoccupations: the major traumas and ruptures of twentieth-century Germany and Europe. But appearances, in this movie, are deceiving. Just as Undine the character is ultimately more elusive and enigmatic than the cerebral, prosaic figure cut in her well-rehearsed museum lectures, Undine the film operates more at the level of myth, or archetypal cultural memory, than of history. For much of its duration, Petzold's film moves ambiguously, and dextrously, between these different modes in something like the way Transit merges its multiple temporalities. Finally, though, Undine the character is subsumed under the thick layers of myth, and Undine the film is – at least after one viewing – both a little too neat and not quite fully satisfying, something less than the sum of its elegant parts. This is without question the work of a master filmmaker operating very near the height of his talents, but after the phenomenal three-film streak of Barbara–Phoenix–Transit, it's inevitably a slight let-down.

My Rembrandt The title of Oeke Hoogendijk's superb documentary may sound sentimental and/or somewhat generic. It isn't either. Rather, it's a real provocation that means something different for each of the major players presented in the film. For the Duke of Buccleuch, it means the Rembrandt masterpiece occupying pride of place among many other Old Master paintings hung on the walls of his Scottish castle. Meanwhile, another astronomically wealthy art collector, based in Paris, decides to sell his pair of Rembrandt marriage portraits, attracting immediate interest from both the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum. The competition between these two great national institutions implicitly suggests – and their directors sometimes explicitly suggest – the question of whether an artist of Rembrandt's lofty stature "belongs" to the particular nation and culture that birthed and shaped him or to the international world of Art more generally (which the Louvre, rightly or wrongly, tends to stand in for in the popular imagination). For Jan Six XI –– a man whose ancestral namesake was a close contact of Rembrandt and whose aristocratic family has been closely associated with the Dutch Golden Age ever since –– "his" Rembrandt is not only the famous portrait of the seventeenth-century Jan Six still in his family's possession, but also the "Portrait of a Young Man" that he bought for a relative pittance at a Christie's auction and which he then endeavours to prove is an authentic Rembrandt work, not merely "circle of," as it was listed at auction. Yet, Six's mission is muddled by controversy, connected in the most immediate sense to professional rivalry and double-crossing within the insular Dutch art world, but more broadly and significantly to complex questions about the commodification and ownership of art and the values placed on authorship, authenticity, and expertise. Like all good documentaries about high art, Hoogendijk's film allows its viewers intimate access to the works themselves, including paintings that would be otherwise difficult for the public to examine in such high-definition detail. But where the main attractions of most art docs basically stop there, My Rembrandt pushes further, posing thorny, philosophically rich questions and supplying, if not the answers to those questions, then some fascinating evidence to mull over, to potentially arrive at our own conclusions. 

Memories to Choke on, Drinks to Wash Them Down  Three of the four vignettes that make up Leung Ming-kai and Kate Reilly's thoroughly delightful film are intrinsically concerned with memory/ies. In the first, an elderly Chinese woman repeats the same personal stories, with occasional colourful embellishments, to her young Indonesian nurse. In the second, two brothers reflect on their past and divergent present circumstances while paying an after-hours visit to their family's toy store. And in the third, a pair of schoolteachers, an HK-Chinese man and an American woman, sporadically meet up for meals at various Hong Kong dining establishments. As she prepares to leave Hong Kong for a job on the mainland, their relationship – something between platonic and romantic – takes on the subtly wistful, memorial quality of a missed opportunity. The film's final episode (a documentary, in contrast with the three preceding fictional stories) is more concerned with the present and the future––those of Hong Kong itself, and particularly its younger generations, who are boldly challenging the political and social status quo. The fourth part's specific subject, a barista running for local political office against a veteran pro-Beijing incumbent, is no less idiosyncratic and funny than the fictional characters populating the earlier vignettes. Her foray into democratic politics and the outcome of the election, the film seems to suggest, will in future also be a memory, whether a hopeful or bitter one. The nature of that memory will in large part be determined by the big-picture future of Hong Kong––a profoundly uncertain question, but perhaps one that will not be unilaterally decided by state authorities.

Summer of 85 At first glance, François Ozon's film looks very much like Call Me by Your Name transplanted from northern Italy to the South of France. Indeed, the similarities between the two films are numerous: both are '80s-set coming-of-age stories and same-sex romances, played out against lush scenic backdrops and full of terrific period detail. But there are also some important differences distinguishing Ozon's film from Luca Guadagnino's. Summer of 85 is more explicitly a memory piece, its emotional immediacy tempered by a certain distance and fragmentedness; though both films were adapted from novels, Ozon's is much more obviously "literary" in its framing of the story. From its opening moments, Summer of 85 is also haunted by the looming spectre of death, and even in its scenes of candy-coloured ebullience the film is shot through with a strain of cynicism. Whatever personal growth the protagonist achieves by the conclusion of this Bildungsroman, it's the product of sudden tragedy, of working through resentment, regret, and grief––not simply of the kind of life-changing, if fleeting, shared romantic feeling described in Michael Stuhlbarg's soliloquy near the end of Guadagnino's film. 

Inconvenient Indian Michelle Latimer's meta-documentary is, for the most part, a worthy cinematic companion piece to Thomas King's instant-classic study of cultural representations of Indigenous peoples and evolving North American government policies, by turns assimilationist and segregationist, regarding these "inconvenient" groups inhabiting lands they sought to control. Despite the presence of King, as a spectator in a movie theatre and the passenger in a taxi driven by a trickster coyote (a nod to his Coyote Columbus Story), the film mostly lacks his singularly wry humour; and it isn't able to un-knot the tangles of history, memory, and myth with anything matching the book's lucidity and critical acumen. But Latimer's film is not meant as a straightforward adaptation of, much less a substitute for, King's book. Rather, King's The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America provides inspiration and a point of departure for the shorter-titled film, which begins by covering some of the same topical ground, but later devotes more of its attention to contemporary First Nations and Inuit cultures––art, politics, community, and issues of everyday life. Latimer's vibrant and varied snapshots provide a strong antidote to the ahistorical/pop-mythic figure that she, and King, interrogate and lament. 

Notwithstanding the many virtues of these contemporary portraits, however, it's unfortunate that Latimer thought it necessary to include graphic footage of a seal being hunted (from a distance) and killed (at close range). Apart from just a matter-of-fact depiction of life in Canada's far North, this sequence seems intended to serve as a stark contrast to earlier-shown footage from Nanook of the North. The Inuit hunters in Robert Flaherty's famous "documentary" are seen using traditional tools, even though they possessed, and used, guns well before the period when Flaherty filmed them. Latimer thus deliberately shows a present-day Inuit hunter making use of a telescopic-sight rifle and Ski-Doo. It's a significant point of contrast, but one that could've been made well enough through oral description, sparing viewers the brutal kill scene. At the very least, the TV channel and/or streaming service that picks up Inconvenient Indian should warn viewers about this grisly moment.

There Is No Other Troy

"There's more to life than books, you know / But not much more"

For me, the period since the start of the pandemic has, by turns, seemed to slowly drag on and fly by at hyper-speed. Though it feels--and I'm certain I'm not alone in this!--like I haven't done much, I've read a ton, and more widely and pleasurably than I've read in years. Just for memory's sake, here are the books I've read cover-to-cover between March and August.

*Martin Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography
*Gary Wills, Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
*Timothy Beal, The Book of Revelation: A Biography
*Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi
*Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality
*Ellen Datlow, editor, The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction
*Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning
*James J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus
*Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
*M.L.W. Laistner, The Intellectual History of the Early Middle Ages
*Petrarch, The Secret
*Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature
*Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation
*Angelo Paredi, Saint Ambrose: His Life and Times
*Johannes Fried, Charlemagne
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
*Helen Phillips, editor, Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval
*John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century

Silver Linings


While 2020 has been generally, very obviously The Worst, it has actually been quite a great year for new music, particularly for "returns" (not to say "comebacks")––to form, to top-shelf excellence, to the fold, as it were: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, of course; Morrissey's strongest album in 14 years; Kathleen Edwards' first in eight years, just as resplendent as where she left off; and now the amazing Microphones in 2020, albeit a "return" in name only, a semantic point that Phil Elverum ruminates over as if it's a matter of the utmost existential urgency and which he uses as a point of departure for a sui generis 45-minute lyrical/photographic single-song autobiograpy. Never solipsistic or narcissistic, it is the perfect summation and merging back together of a musical oeuvre that had felt radically bifurcated––not by the mere nominal distinction between Microphones records and Mount Eerie records but by universalistic nature-focused abstraction and sonic experimentation on the one hand and the most painfully hyperspecific and literal death albums ever recorded on the other. "I was already who I am," sings Elverum at one point on Microphones in 2020, reflecting back on his much younger self's way of being in, and looking around at, the world. Where in most cases a line like this would just sound like a syntactically odd cliché, it registers here like a midlife epiphany of seismic proportions.

NBA players are legitimate heroes, truly doing what they can: using their influence and celebrity to fight the forces of systemic racism and incipient fascism and to encourage activism, democratic change, and full enfranchisement. I really love basketball, but Black Lives Matter infinitely more.

FUCK THIS MAN!!!! WE DEMAND CHANGE. SICK OF IT

— LeBron James (@KingJames) August 26, 2020

"Life tends to come and go"

Return of the Repressed


At first glance, Steven Patrick Morrissey and Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart would seem to share little in common: a sexagenarian male Brit recently noted more for his (to put it mildly!) highly dubious political views than for his musical output and a 42-year-old, bi-coastal (at this point, equal parts NYC and LA) American woman with at least semi-reclusive tendencies and neurotic compulsions. Yet, first appearances can be deceiving: both Morrissey and Apple are unapologetic iconoclasts and sometime pariahs, united, despite their obvious political differences, by a profound and scathing distrust (for better or worse) of "the media," the music industry and record labels, and established "authority" and "institutions" in general. Both are borderline misanthropes who seem fonder of non-human animals, incapable of deceit and duplicity and in need of protection and advocacy, than of (most) human beings. And, though Apple has taken strides forward as an increasingly remarkable sonic stylist where Morrissey has always depended on the musical gifts of his collaborators, both are first and foremost brilliant singer-songwriters, marked by idiosyncratic literary sensibilities (Apple's famous admiration of Maya Angelou compares well with Morrissey's lifelong Oscar Wilde obsession) and singularly affected vocal performances.

The consequence of these significant commonalities is that both Morrissey and Apple--despite having enjoyed accomplished careers, earning the "distinguished veteran" status that many such artists simply coast by on in perpetuity--have delivered new albums that sound unmistakably like they still have something important left to prove. Urgent and powerful and intensely personal, these records are "edgy" in the fullest, truest sense of that over-used adjective, with titles tellingly selected as explicit thesis statements. Moz needs the world to know that, love him or hate him (or something in between those extremes), he's "not a dog on a chain," and will never be so. Apple opts for the imperative over the declarative, imploring her listener (or herself) to cut the thick, oppressive bars caging them (or her) in. It's not that Morrissey and Apple don't want to be liked, or to have their music purchased and praised. Of course they do. But what they both crave more than that, and perhaps above all, is "to be free"--a primal desire that can often be rather boring or banal as an artist's mission statement, whatever the medium. What makes these two albums so interesting and engaging (and often prickly!) is that neither Morrissey nor Apple is ultimately, totally sure of what "freedom" means, or what exactly it entails.

To each their own frustrations. They're not mine, that's for sure, but when the songs are this fucking good, personal and/or political identification takes a backseat to complicated, volcanic emotion impeccably translated into rhythm, melody, and dexterous lyrical poetry that might well have merited approval from the likes of Angelou and Wilde.

And you're wearing time, like a flowery crown

Holy shit, what a song!

And what a record! I've always *liked* her, but this new album is really something else! It's like peak-PJ Harvey--the visceral rawness/roughness of 4-Track Demos perfectly merged with the dramatic grandeur of To Bring You My Love; a knockout combination that deepens and surprises with each listen.

Shut In

A Perfect Day of Cinema


I didn't agree with too many of Roger Ebert's particular views on film, but his observation that "no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough" was right on the mark. Personally, I love long, immersive movies –- so long as they're good or great –– and I always find myself perplexed when people complain about the length of films (e.g., The Irishman!) that they otherwise admired and/or enjoyed. (Even more perplexing: many of these same people have no trouble binge-watching entire seasons of TV shows in a single sitting...) Below is one possible approach to a full, at-home day (=1440 minutes) of great, long cinema––or just slightly over that: 1443 minutes in total. Skip the end credits, if need be!

–La Dolce Vita (Fellini, 1960, 180 min.)
–Barry Lyndon (Kubrick, 1975, 187 min.)
–Fanny and Alexander [Swedish television cut] (Bergman, 1982, 312 min.)
–The Puppetmaster (Hou, 1993, 142 min.)
–Sátántangó (Tarr, 1994, 450 min.)
–The New World [extended cut] (Malick, 2005, 172 min.)

Do you think you've made the right decision this time?


One more addendum: Apparently, Morrissey played a big arena show in London just two weeks ago; ironically, the King of Cancellations went forward with this gig, against all logic and sound public-health advice! For what may well go down as one of the more infamous/dangerous concerts of all-time (Morrissey himself is now 60 and has had significant health troubles in recent years, not to mention the thousands of fans, staff, and crew members packed into the arena...), he opened with an uncomfortable a cappela joke, segueing not to "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore" but, even more appropriately, "London," performed under a memed image of the You Are the Quarry cover, rechristened "You Are the Quarantined" with a masked Moz (video above). Then, after working through a slew of deep cuts, recent covers, and new-album material, plus a terrific "Half a Person" mixed in for good measure, he closed with one of his very best (and darkest) songs, a plague-inflected "Jack the Ripper": "Rats! Rats! Thousands! Thousands of rats!"

Rank


As a follow-up to my last post, I thought it might be a fun thought exercise (/time-killing distraction) to rank all Smiths plus Moz-solo albums together. The list below, though, excludes compilations, live albums, etc. –– only proper studio LPs –– though, admittedly, if counted, records like Hatful of Hollow, Louder than Bombs, Bona Drag, and, above all, Rank (up there with Live at the Apollo and Stop Making Sense as one of the greatest live albums ever!) would place highly. But there are just too many such items, official and less-than-official, with much overlap in their contents. (My songs list from a few years ago, however, helps to account for the many great tracks that aren't on any of these studio albums, though obviously it doesn't include anything from I Am a Dog on a Chain.)

01. The Queen Is Dead (1986)
02. Vauxhall and I (1994)
03. The Smiths (1984)
04. Strangeways, Here We Come (1987)
05. Meat Is Murder (1985)
06. Ringleader of the Tormentors (2006)
07. Your Arsenal (1992)
08. Viva Hate (1988)
09. I Am Not a Dog on a Chain (2020)
10. You Are the Quarry (2004)
11. Southpaw Grammar (1995)
12. Years of Refusal (2009)
13. Kill Uncle (1991)
14. Maladjusted (1997)
15. Low in High School (2017)
16. World Peace Is None of Your Business (2014)
17. California Son (2019)

Time Will Come (But It Hasn't Yet)


I Am Not a Dog on a Chain is the best Morrissey album since Ringleader of the Tormentors. It's not quite as front-to-back excellent as that one (his most underrated classic album), but, to my tastes, it's roughly on-par with You Are the Quarry, and better than the two between You Are the Quarry and Vauxhall and I (still, by a mile, his post-Smiths best) ––– all considered, far higher praise than I thought I'd ever be able to extend to a new Morrissey record at this point. This is just a stellar collection of songs -- crisply, often surprisingly produced, sung with maximum conviction and/or affectation, and full of instantly vintage Moz-isms: "Time will send you an invoice / And you pay with your strength and your legs and your sight and your voice," "In the garden by the graves / I can just about behave," "Why can't you bring figs all pulpy and moist? / Roasted in passion and salty in voice?," "Congratulations / You're still OK / I'd kiss your lips off / Any day," etc. etc.

Apart from a couple tracks I'm still on the fence about (but will probably come around on soon enough), everything here is either really good or truly great, especially "Once I Saw the River Clean," "My Hurling Days Are Done," "Bobby, Don't You Think They Know?," "Love Is on Its Way Out," and "The Truth About Ruth." The first two, in particular, may well be up there with the very best of his post-Smiths catalogue: the former a vividly though impressionistically recalled memory piece harking back to his childhood, with shades of Seamus Heaney, Van Morrison, and (most obviously) the self-consciously Dickensian early stretch of Morrissey's own Autobiography, and musically quite unlike anything he's sung over before; the latter a tender, soul-baring ballad along the lines of "Now My Heart Is Full" and "We'll Let You Know," but delivered here as a contemplation of mortality and time's passage that isn't archly morbid but poignant and honest. In lesser hands (or even just in a lesser Moz song), a line like "mama and teddy bear / were the first full, firm spectrum of time" would come off as awkward and maudlin. This song's so great that it sounds downright Proustian.

If the Movie-Year Ended Right Now


Which, sadly, it might, give or take straight-to-streaming stuff...

01. Emma (de Wilde)
02. The Traitor (Bellocchio)
03. Onward (Scanlon)
04. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Becher/Phelan)
05. Sonic the Hedgehog (Fowler)

A few points:

1) I have an eleven-year-old son, who also saw all of these except for the Bellocchio film--technically, a 2019 release, but first screened here in January as part of our Italian Film Festival. Sadly then, but far more sadly now, The Traitor –– which is quite good but not top-tier Bellocchio –– was the only screening I made it to during that mini-festival.

2) He liked nos. 3–5, but thought Emma was just 'meh.' But, to be fair, he still thinks romance is gross, and was disappointed that there was some snuck into Cabin Boy, which we revisited the other day and which he otherwise thoroughly enjoyed--as well he should, because it's one of the all-time great film farces.

3) There is a non-zero chance that Sonic the Hedgehog (which actually isn't bad, and has maybe the best Jim Carrey performance since The Truman Show, if not The Cable Guy, but is certainly no masterpiece) will finish in my top ten, if not top five, for 2020, if the multiple, successive 'waves' of coronavirus prophesied by epidemiologists come to pass. Very strange times.

Strange You Never Knew

Great song, terrific performance--and check out how young Conan looks! I miss the 90s.