Too Perfect

The cult of David Fincher as auteur probably share diverse notions as to what his draw is. Perhaps foremost among them is his reputation for being a methodical, calculating perfectionist and demanding exorbitant amounts of takes in much of the same manner Kubrick is known for. Additionally, his work is often characterized by scenes showing a surgical precision exacted in getting deep into the viscera of the audience. But, on a more subtle level, the guy is uncanny when it comes to the focus he preserves throughout his vision, considering how large the scale of his work often is and how varied his source material has been.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011, Fincher) is only disappointing because the franchise it's based on is a series of international best selling novels. I get apprehensive about any movie that is poised to open across the world; you know, the big ones. Because in the end, mass market entertainment kind of has to be diluted, once it is served in such a large quantity.

Why does The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo work in Fincher's hands? Because he exceeds when it comes to this antiseptic, dark, cold Scandinavian milieu. The design of this film comes across as almost high tech in a sense. It just feels so modern. The barren landscape is complimented by desolate production design. I still feel the cold from that house--someone let that cat in!

In addition to the production design and art direction, Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor again contribute to the soundtrack with post industrial electronic ambient soundscape type percussion that further advances on the styles they'd experimented with for The Social Network (2010, Fincher). These elements are also crucial to the Fincher touch.

The plot is banal and bores me.

The timeless, exquisite beauty of Rooney Mara is supported by her talent to deliver a convincing performance as Lisbeth Salander--the emotional core of this movie and the primary reason Fincher has captured my adoration here. This girl is modern in the sense that she epitomizes the counter culture of her generation. In the 50s, JDs wore leather jackets, white tee shirts, greased back hair, smoked cigarettes and rode motorcycles--this is Lisbeth's lineage--and in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the self-imposed Hollywood cigarette boycott is clearly flouted. So in a sense, Lisbeth seems like a return to the sure footing of the 50s, as opposed to the chaos and divergent cultural identities that marked, say, the late 60s. Or, should I say, she's a classic rebel, lacking political pretense. And who's she pine over? Who does any upwardly mobile Greaser go for? A Soc!

The denouement is more sugary than it was undoubtedly intended. She's supposed to be scarred, but it just feels like a small bruise. Nevertheless, I identify with, empathize with and root with her for the whole two and a half hours she's up there.

This is too black and white, good guy vs. bad guy for me. But, I'll admit, seeing a rapist get his comeuppance still generates that special brand of catharsis that hits me on the most rudimentary level. The bloodlust that comes with the urge for revenge against anyone who has harmed innocent women or children is one of the instances I'm most vulnerable to being manipulated when I watch films: and that in itself is an entirely different matter to delve into--I just know I try to keep an eye on that. For me though, it's almost a little like Fincher's talent is wasted on this kind of thing--he can usually find plot points that appear more unexpected.

I think his insight into the minutia of historical tabloid operas is his greatest strength. Don't get me wrong though: since Zodiac (2007, Fincher), I find all of David Fincher's movies endlessly rewarding. For me, he's the best working director in the business (uh-oh, superlative praise? I think it's warranted here).

--Dregs

What If Salt Wasn't a Cartoon?

With another low end mid sized budget, Haywire (2012) is Steven Soderbergh's latest foray into serving two masters at the box office. The movie appeals to those who will be entertained watching Mallory Kane (Gina Carano) running and getting into hand to hand combat, in no less than five sequences, spanning the entire duration of this whopping ninety minute powder keg; and, it similarly holds a draw for those entertained by watching the conspiratorial intricacies of the ensemble unfold, at an explosive pace, before diving back into themselves for somewhat of a coda.

Late in the film, there's a scene where Michal Douglas plays a high ranking government official who makes comments effectively pathologizing the type of personality Mallory Kane has, which in a way represents the two halves of the audience and how they need each other. He says he know how it must feel for her to run around, always looking over your shoulder, and how she needs that rush. So, he's admitting that he's exploiting her and that he knows exactly how to do so.

It feels like that's what Soderbergh's done, successfully.

However, it may be unfortunate that there just isn't enough time to connect with any of these characters on any significant level. Moreover, all of the events depicted in the film occur in only eight days. But this unfortunate characteristic distills the very nature of Mallory Kane: she doesn't have time for any of this either, due to the nature of her lifestyle. We're made to feel what it's like to be swept up in her roller coaster of an existence--one second running, the next chasing, constantly.

Most of the film's urban locations are complimented with what sounds like 70s Blacksploitation funk-fused chase tunes. The music never felt intrusive or like it suffered from caricaturing the lead protagonist, which could easily have been the case because of the fantastically high stakes this young woman must negotiate. If however, that sort of thing is your bag, Salt (2010, Phillip Noyce) is nothing short of an absurdist cartoon of the female spy on the run plot. I enjoy Salt, but the difference with Haywire is that I actually think while enjoying it, and can buy into the story.

The cinematography wasn't as expressionistic as Contagion (2011, Soderbergh), which is interesting because it shows Soderbergh's restraint. Or, what I'm trying to say is he could have gone a lot bigger and louder with this, but I like the understated approach. He's still managed to film in predominately daylight (overly blue) or tungsten (overly orange, or yellow) settings, to provide some added dimension to the locations dramatically. And the black and white shots from the mission to rescue Jiang are employed nicely, to distinguish this single narrative thread from a total of three concurrently played out onscreen, ending with all three threads converging in black and white. On the technical side though, the dolly shots tracking Mallory running through the Barcelona back alleys are marvelously fluid and alive with open air realism.

The editing of Mallory's part in the Barcelona mission is so quick and effective. Soderbergh and Stephen Mirrione are able to achieve such precision that it's almost something I take for granted. With Haywire, I wasn't disappointed.

--Dregs

guest spot: AliciaO on The 21st Century's debut album, The City

Record review! AliciaO wrote this 'un.

As with anything, there is bad news, and there is good news. Since all of the good things are paramount, let's burst out the bad riffraff first: The 21st Century's debut album, The City, is far too short. Six tracks of radiant resonation leave you craving more of this octet's spirited approach to music making. On to a discussion of the good news, which is just how authentically rich The City, and The 21st Century as a whole, are.

From the beginning, The City nestles into your being with purpose, starting with "The City is My Sweetheart"; a love song that transpires as a day through the city—but not with romantic rose-rimmed glasses—instead with folksy-flair and tambourine. The banalities and realities of daily life are noted, yet still the tauntingly hopeful words of "Here I am, what you got to show me?" brightly ring out, offering the desire for what we all want: the chance to experience the existing world as truthfully as possible. And the best part is that The 21st Century is right: there is wonder, mystery and excitement even when all you have is yourself and the city.

Lacking irony and performed in genuine earnest, each song, from "Jigsaw Paws" to "The Parisian Translation" to "The Good Things", convinces you that hope is of the essence of life—not through lyrics, but through the movement across the keyboards, the four-part vocals that smooth their way into your mind, the steady beat, and the warmly appealing horn harmonies that create a sense of familiarity and trust with the musicians.

Thematically throughout the album, the lyrics point to the simple truth that the world sometimes feels asleep and we're stuck in a tumultuous experience of not fitting in, but within all this is an uprising. As lamentations of being an adult are belted out, all you want to do when listening to The City is flick your wrists, sway your shoulders, and fire up your toes: In other words, dance.

My two favorite tracks, "Funeral March (The State of Our Parade)" and "We are Waiters", align themselves with the rest of the albums' features—seamlessly and energetically bringing to light a love of life, a realization of reality, and yet enthusiasm for what we are and what we have. Listening to The City, it's as if this octet is keenly aware that they get what everyone else gets: a lifetime. Despite what we're offered, we can make the best of everything. And The 21st Century certainly did.

What makes me say that? Well, it's the story behind The City being mixed and released. Belting out lyrics such as "Oh ain't life a tease" with authentic earnest instead of irony wound up foreshadowing the past year of their existence. 2011 was devoted to traveling to Texas to record their first album, their legendary producer mixed away their musical integrity, half of the original band members left in pursuit of new dreams, and the band had to choose whether to define who they were on their own terms or follow his lead down a path of pop-laden, repetitive tune-making.

Thankfully, even though the band deviated away from their original producer and his pop-aspirations for them, The City still came to be, and with the high-spirited melodies, off-beat lyrics, intricate rhythmic arrangements and a definitively dynamic horn section they are known around the San Francisco Bay Area for. Is it pop? God no. It is music with meaning, soul, and laborious passion. And darn it, it's freaking good.

MEV-1 vs. the World

If I were to pitch two stakes at each of the furthest ends my cinematic taste reaches, one would represent the prosaic dramatization of everyday human nature and the other would mark sensuous escape into the fantastic. Or, I look to either be deeply moved or taken for a fun ride; yet, I rarely expect to find a movie that delivers both at once.

Contagion (2011, Steven Soderbergh) shall be categorized as a fun ride (even though there's nothing fun about a story involving a deadly virus), filled with thrills, that moves along at an assuredly purposeful pace right up until its 100 minute running time expires. And then it's over. The film is so compact and self contained (big pun intended) that you just need to sit back and let it happen to you--the hallmark of all genre films?

While this film may lack a dramatic gravitas that stays with the viewer, its formal achievements are so efficient that this becomes a case of style serving as substance. I am reminded of opening a new toy as a kid and the delight of escaping into a fantastic adventure, right out of the box--that's what watching Contagion feels like.

Fist, there's the music. Cliff Martinez's score surprised the heck out of me. Watching the movie, it was audacious at first. To see the montages concurrently launched with this 80s new wave inspired power synth driving and unifying them cracked me up--but they work. It's difficult for me to describe the affinity I feel for kitschy B movie sci-fi aesthetics, but I've always enjoyed the way space helmets and chemistry sets make me think of cutesy beeps and whirring sf/x. And one Mr. John Carpenter was responsible for the watershed synth score he composed for Halloween (1978, Carpenter), which borrowed from Italian giallo scores from bands like Goblin, influencing generic conventions for decades to follow. But back to Cliff Martinez. The synthesizers aren't something I'm qualified or capable of describing in any significant way, however, the guy goes into some funky Moog solos that rock.

The counterpart to the vibrant, modern scoring of Contagion is Soderbergh's cinematography (Peter Andrews is a pseudonym Soderbergh has used since Traffic). This film's palette strikes me as predominately green and yellow and I think it's because this movie is about people getting very sick and dying from a highly contagious virus. Soderbergh shot this on a RED, so I'm guessing he likely photographed with a color temperature that didn't overly correct for the fluorescent, sodium vapor, metal halide lamps, or even daylight and tungsten fixtures--but these colors also could have been manipulated in post. The later Gwyneth Paltrow scenes make heavy use of a tilt shift in the lens. The tilt shift is a special attachment that allows the lens to shift in the housing of the barrel, but what its effect is turns out to be a soft, blurry distortion surrounding the clearly focused center of the frame (this movie uses it a lot, but I can only think of the regatta in The Social Network (2010, David Fincher) for a comparable reference.)

Somewhat related to the cinematography, Soderbergh's blocking is also notable in that he is increasingly in the habit of composing with out of focus objects in the foreground, which I enjoy. He must be having fun these days. His work is vibrant, youthful and slick.

The structure of the screenplay is what allows for this formal excursion to preserve its focus though. With a simple conflict: deadly MEV-1 outbreak as antagonist vs. Earth as protagonist, the script is composed as a day-by-day account, and to me, cohesively shows everything I wanted to see in the world of this story.

Many will comment about the all-star ensemble, but I'll just say I like Demetri Martin as a CFC scientist who looks a little like an indy nerd hipster and Marion Cotillard is too gorgeous for me to forget who she really is and imagine she's an epidemiologist--she's just so classically glamorous.

There are at least two scenes I'd noticed where two characters from opposite ends of the socio-economic spectrum cross paths. There's the janitor (John Hawkes) who seems overly entitled in his demands from the high ranking CDC Dr. (Laurnce Fishburne) and the two passersby the Gwyneth Paltrow character infects: the Ukrainian fashion model and the Chinese busboy. At first I thought this was heavy handed, but then I decided that Soderbergh may be preserving genre conventions from 70s disaster pics where the ensemble typically brought together such disparate figures. I also should bring up Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944) as a prototype, and if there're earlier examples in film, I cannot think of them at the moment.

A final though I had concerns the Ukrainian model. I am embarrassed to admit that I've never considered myself qualified to discuss politics and I might not even have a clear grasp on what exactly the word means always, under exceptional contexts. But to me, I think the filmmakers are making a subtle comment about a news item I recall reading about, which reported on the potential regulation of model's BMIs before being allowed to take to the runway. Of the three models, two were eastern European, and one, Snejana Onopka is Ukrainian. So, I think the fact that she is the first character to die, very quickly after being contaminated, may hint that her immune system was the weakest due to her dangerously low BMI. Of course, I admit, this may be an absurd speculation. But, then again.

And there's a subtle narrative point that may be stretched to read an eco-friendly message therein. The film ends with a shot of a bulldozer razing a wild bat habitat, and that bulldozer has an AIMM Alderson placard. AIMM Alderson is the company the Gwyneth Paltrow character was a global sales rep for and the Japanese businessman in the casino takes AIMM Alderson documents on the plane back to Japan with him, inferring that their deal somehow precipitated the entire outbreak. Again, if these are political messages, I'm still not sure. But that's how it looks.

The ending is a simple joy of narrative convention. After allowing yourself to be engrossed in a narrative, paying attention and actively engaging with it, there is often the tendency to show the beginning at the very end. The biggest example may be the entire conception of Lucas's prequel trilogy, ending with Anakin putting on the Darth Vader costume; there're plenty of detractors, Patton Oswalt being one of the funnier. But in Contagion, I still can get a big kick out of seeing the beginning as an epilogue. And screenwriters tend to aim for the goal of "show don't tell," so the Contagion ending can serve as proof of what happens when it's done right.

--Dregs

Fat's best HEAVY TUNES of 2011

Malverde, Red Fang, Murder the Mountains
Short Version, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
running on nothing, Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
TNK, 801, 801 Live
Woke up Near Chelsea, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, the Brutalist Bricks
Black Captain, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Wolfroy Goes to Town
The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral, Mastodon, Crack the Skye
(), the Men, Leave Home
Boring Girls (live), Pissed Jeans, WFMU Comp
We Left the Apes to Rot, but Find the Fang Grows Within, Red Sparowes, Aphorisms
jigsaw puzzle, Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
always never know when to quit, Big Business, Quadruple Single
Miss Two Knives, Single Bullet Theory, Single Bullet Theory
Estate Sale Sign, the Mountain Goats, All Eternals Deck
Jacket (orchestral), Shallow Gravy, Jacket EP
keep pushin', Pierced Arrows, 45

All Eternals Deck

Tied with David Comes to Life as the record that meant the most to me in 2011. Only misses were "the Autopsy Garland" (a fine song, but the Steely Dan references were a turnoff), "Age of Kings" (too much whispering, too much quavery violin), "Sourdoire Valley Song" (too slow, too much falsetto, but the lyrics might be the album's best), & "for Charles Bronson" (just too on the nose).

Though there's not one song that does it for me every-note/every-word, "Beautiful Gas Mask", "Birth of Serpents", "Prowl Great Cain", are damn close, and "Damn These Vampires" is as close to absolutely perfect as any song I've ever heard; I only left it off the best-song list to try to avoid being completely trite. "Birth of Serpents" and, oddly, "Liza Forever Minelli" have two or three lines that make me misty every single time. "High Hawk Season" makes me sing along with my nothing voice every single time. "Never Quite Free" might have the album's best arrangements, and even though I have no idea what it's 'about', the way the song is put together makes me happy every time I hear it.

David Comes to Life

Almost certainly too long, and with some weak spots like dry rot, but a hell-week when I couldn't go/be home, my lady was four time zones away, all I had was this record through the sub-thumbnail-sized speakers in my netbook, and even though I was kind of crying a lot, everything seemed okay whenever I heard something like "hello my name is David" or "where the fuck is the other shoe", or the spit-shout hoarse desperation of "it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it it's all been worth it".

The drums are obliteratingly good, the guitars sound as good as any record you've ever owned, the bass is mixed just a hair too low for me, and the entire album sounds/feels like a heart-full teary-eyed smile-cry confession about how much you like really like somebody and just have to tell them about it all about it right now now now it hurts and goddamnit I had to do it and live/die/lose/win/walk/run/cry/laugh I'll never regret a second of this moment.

My sophomore year, I bought Quadrophenia on tape, used at the Buckingham Mall, a many-mile walk from my house, and I spent untold hours walking around Aurora listening to it again and again--David Comes to Life is less ambitious, less over-done, and slightly less successful, but it rocks a lot harder, and I'm not in my sophomore year anymore.

The stupidest thing I did at a show this year was leave during the encore.

Picked "running on nothing" more or less at random. It's great. "life in paper" would have worked about as well and I'm going to stop adding to this list, b/c if I don't, I'm going to list all but like three tunes.

Pissed Jeans

Old song, probably, but I never heard it, and this specific version is the greatest thing ever. Extra-special bonus points go to the drummer for being incredibly game.

Everything about this track is perfect.

Short Version

This record is only middling, but it makes a lot more sense after seeing them live. On the album, you just get a lot of fairly restrained pop-prog, but live you get a couple of Sleater-Kinney alums with as much raw charisma as anybody playing music, Mary Timony's virtuosity and sly hamminess and a more-than-the-sum-of-the-considerable-parts let's-fucking-go-for-it ethos that made the long, long, version of "racehorse" one of the four or five best live moments I had this year. Real players in the service of an improvisational, incantory, Patti-Smith-like tune: my brain & body were both annihilated.

But on record, "short version" was the best executed pop song with riffs and explosions and "Oh-KAY! Awl-RITE!" and bliss.

()

I don't remember why I went to this show alone; I do remember that I went to see Milk Music, who I love, and who played a very, very good set, and who were absolutely occluded in my memory by the savage brilliance of The Men. I had to leave (home) early, to catch BART, b/c living in the East Bay is a nightmare, and the last thing I heard was a phenomenal rendition of (). As untouchably brilliant as it is on record, hearing it live added a layer of repetition-build, 10 layers of dynamics, and 23 layers of intensity. The definitional HEAVY TUNE of 2011.

I just found out there's another record coming in early 2012, and that's the best culture news I've had since Chinese Democracy came out.

Malverde

Took me a long, long time to warm to this record. Two main obstacles: the first single, "Wires", sounds like (the) tepid gruel (typically) expectorated by Queens of the Stone Age; the first time I saw Red Fang was one of the greatest live moments of my life, with a couple drone-riff & groove-stomp burners they seem to have retired. Compared to "humans remain human remains" and "suicide", a lot of their material has lacked a certain luster--but this song is flawless like a mammoth-sized emerald avalanching down a steep hill, here and there bounding up and catching air, but it doesn't spare anybody, it only builds more tension before flattening whatever's in its way.

Red Sparowes

This band is a long-time favorite--I was loving their shit when I was still getting tattoos--and this EP adds substantial and nasty edge to the band's drone-flow style. Minute per minute, by far the best thing I bought this year. Takes me places every time.

Jacket

Fuck it, I can't help it: this melody really works for me. Venture Brothers is the best show on TV, partly because its creators are legit polymaths.

Woke up Near Chelsea

A toss-up: I only discovered Ted Leo this year, and I've already had a deeply weird relationship with his records. At least three times in 2011, I've been on camping trips with no music and Shake the Sheets stuck irremovably in my head--I shit you not! So for now, I'm not letting myself listen to that record, and I'm holding myself to the Brutalist Bricks.

I had a conversation with David Roth once, and he argued that the production on these records is unovercomably offputting. And there are moments of Bricks where that's almost true*: the drums all sound enh and the bass production is frankly repellent (nowhere more so than on "mourning in America" and the way-too-compressed "the mighty sparrow"), but on this number, Leo's songwriting/arranging genius takes over and rumble-tumbles big riffs over and around seizing melodies. In a way, choosing this song is a cop-out, but these two records spent a huge amount of time in my rotation this year, and will next year too, and this tune might be the easiest one to access if you're not me. (I came fucking close to picking "Tuberculoids Arrive in Hop", because I fucking love that song, but I thought it better to stick with a straight number.)

Only songs I can't seem to enjoy are "gimmie the wire", which is musically great but I can't get past the "Tipper" line, and "one Polaroid a day", with a creepily in-your-ear soul whisper-growl that I don't like from anybody. The way Leo & his band put a song together--which is songwriting far more than lyric-writing is--is one of the best things I've discovered in the past couple years. Lots of parts! And malproduced or not, the drummer is tight as fuck.

Black Captain

As good a song as Will Oldham has ever written--which inarguably means that it's as good a song as anybody has ever written.

TNK

Heard this on KALX, ran it down mere days later at a time when I was too broke to be buying records. It's by a wide margin the best tune on the record, unfortunately, but I like Eno well enough, and, per my gushing over live Wild Flag, have a lot of fondness for soloy pop-prog, which this is. (There was a BBC recording of Eno's band that turns all the still, measured perfection of Taking Tiger Mountain into slipshod boogie--no shit: avoid that one. Avoid it hard.)

jigsaw puzzle

Beggars Banquet is now my go-to Stones record. Not as scathing as Exile nor as studio-overreaching as Let it Bleed, it's just a perfectly executed collection of surprisingly varied songs--with essentially no idiot missteps (think "Brown Sugar"). I picked "jigsaw puzzle" because I think it probably has more verses than all other Stones songs I love combined.

Open question: did anyone ever take "salt of the earth" at face value?

The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral

Not a huge fan of Mastodon. They're radically overproduced, and the vocals are probably the worst of any major band in any genre. But sometimes the guy stops his atonal keening and the band goes off. They're a lot like Jane's Addiction, in other words, in that their one-trick fake virtuosity is only compelling because they spend so much time fucking around trying to pull off things they're not good at. But at 3:45 or so of this one, when the acoustics & vocals fade away and we get a couple seconds of stolen-from-High-on-Fire Sabbath-saw riffage, nothing could make more sense or be more satisfying: at least until 5:25, when it gets even better for a minute.

Bonus points for the worst lyric any heavy band ever wrote: "wasting valuable time". Hey, dude: your moron B-school ambitions are showing. If you actually want people to think you're a metal band, you follow "wasting" with "my foes" or something. You don't write paeans to efficiency (FFS).

Miss Two Knives

Far the best song on the record, but there's only so many Cheap Trick records in this worthless, degraded world, so sometimes a man just has to shove two knives into the power-pop hole in his soul.

always never know when to quit

I put this on Noodles' .mp3 player and she called me one day to say "this is funny--it makes me laugh". That's half the reason I love Big Business. The other half is that the power of their fuzz & Jared's Axl-like ability to harmonize with himself is heart-squeezingly powerful.

keep pushin'

Saw Pierced Arrows a lot this year, for some reason. Kelly's drumming has gotten better and better, and the pre-Halloween show Noodles & I caught at Thee Parkside was as good as any Dead Moon show ever was. They also opened up for Dinosaur Jr. at the Fillmore, and garnered more than a few fans from the shockingly young crowd. That's where I first heard this peppy little number, which makes me smile.

*I should note explicitly that I think the Pharmacists are sounding on record exactly like they want to: the production Roth finds so problematic is deliberate, not incompetent.

Killer of Sheep

0. Pointlessly Long Introduction (new day rising)

Not to step on Dregs' toes here, but I got to scratch several movie itches simultaneously last night. I moved to Oakland almost exactly three and a half years ago, and for the first few months, out of work and aimless, wrestling with life-challenged depression¹ as a decided departure from my Portland-based stasis-stifled-self-centered depression², I spent most of my time drinking daylight coffee by the quart and reading the Times. It was there, probably, that I first heard of a 1977 student film called Killer of Sheep that had (a) blown minds upon its release and (b) gone unreleased & undistributed for decades due to music-rights issues.

Some years later, TWBGITW mentioned the film--I believe in the context of boys receiving bike-directed violence--as something I literally had to see.

Combine these two itches--either surely sufficient--with my oft-voiced one-liner about living in Oakland:

I like it partly because I get to use Berkeley & SF as resources without having to live in either one of them.

One of the key Berkeley resources is the Pacific Film Archive, which has expensive tickets and a tiny screen, but superb taste.

1. Killer of Sheep (everything falls apart)

PFA's presentation was stark and transitionless: no trailers, no promotional materials. They turned the lights off and rolled the film.

Deliberate or not, it was a flaw-free introduction to the experience: with no buffer, you're thrown into deep intimacy: tight closeup on a boy's face, with a bellowing voice dressing him down. Slowly you become aware the source of the voice is an undershirt-clad trunk in the foreground.

The words concern loyalty, solidarity, violence, and threat. The boy is told to stand up for himself and his brother right or wrong, or face consequences at home.

Another unbuffered transition: children at play. Now and throughout the film you see that this play is in ruins environmentally, essentially prop-free in terms of equipment, and constantly, constantly, violent.

The next transition feels less jarring, perhaps because the film's rhythms and stylistic unity are asserting themselves by now. You're in a kitchen, watching a man work from a deeply odd camera angle. Eventually the man knocks off and joins his friend for some coffee, talk, and dominoes. He's half-haunted, he says he doesn't sleep, he says he's done wrong, but "nothing that would make the Devil blush". And it is this man we mostly follow for the next hour and change, as he goes to work, mopping up offal in an abbatoir, as he endures a Sisyphian odyssey to secure a motor for his car, as he moves through and is completely enmeshed in a run-down world without resources of any discernable kind.

This is a poverty never seen on film, made rawer and rougher by the man--Stan, we discover--'s insistence that he's not poor, not really: he gives to the Salvation Army--gives--and..."you want to see poor...you go look at Winston's place..." where they're eating wild greens from a vacant lot and huddling around the oven for heat.

2. Killer of Sheep (hardly getting over it)

Plot and character play a significant role in this picture. The greatest impacts, though, came from three aspects of theme or mood.

• Stan's quiet and isolation is so profound, and so intimately presented, that his immobility, his almost unmoved and unresponsive countenance in the face of his wife's sexual needs, is painful to watch. It cuts even deeper as you watch his wife's determined, practiced primping.
• The primping of the mother is recapitulated in the film's many daughters--and half the movie is seemingly given over to meticulously detailed ramifications of Wordsworth's "the child is father to the man". Jocular jockeying among the men mirrors the everpresent wrestling and horseplay between the boys; though all the children we see are sexless, the genders are pretty thoroughly divided and already battering away at one another--as when a group of girls drive off a single boy, hurling his bike wheel and venom at his sob-wracked fleeing back. Watching the somewhat aimless kids slowly congeal into their parents, with a newly pregnant, shy young woman toward the end of the piece, or when Stan's son snarls at his tiny sister "I need some money", chills, freezes, saddens.
• Hardest yet to take throughought the near-total grimness and deprivation of the film and its milieu is the hammered-thin but not annihilated hope maintained. The primping counts here, and Stan's insistence that he's not poor, and these moments find endless echoes, as a handout is politely, sadly, turned down, or as everybody gets dressed up and heads out in a finally-repaired car for an afternoon in the country, an endeavour exactly parallel to Stan's grinding, doomed, quest for an engine. Or when Stan's little girl says to another, who's been missing a lot of school "but you'll fall behind". Exhaustion and effort are everywhere in the movie, and more than a little abdication and abandonment. The experience of watching this is split raggedly between wanting to cry "it's futile, you're doomed, give up" and gasping "you can't stop there".

3. Killer of Sheep (you can live at home now)

Maybe it's not hard to sum up Killer of Sheep:

if you like movies, black people, or true things, you need to see this film

Which probably explains why it went unseen for three decades.

4. Outro (keep hanging on)

Further reading:
New Yorker DVD of the Week
New Yorker reissue notice
NYT DVD notice
NYT reissue notes

--Fat, seeing Badlands & Mean Streets tonight, too

¹Three representative pieces. And one example of my mind absolutely splintering with isolation and frenzied self-directed fury: hard for me to read this one.

²In lieu of citing this, I will merely gesture toward this.

how you will know

Camping is, perhaps, part of human life, and to the extent that it is, it--like everything else--is received as a half-spiced mulligatawney, equal parts semi-sensical slogans grooved into your brain, your thoughts a needle running along them, the grooves' exponents echoes spilling out and dominating your practice for years of a life, only revealed after infinite mental repetitions to be just a nonce-rule, just a string of words once spilled out a mouth, nothing that could or should justifiably govern action--equal parts, I said--and the kinds of hard-won factoids that, given any opportunity whatever, will inevitably fly forth from your face like some kind of moral law every man jack must know instanter and follow for now & forever: one thing I know in the first sense about camping is that a person ought always to keep tidy, as a sloppy camp makes all operations shoddy and difficult (though I'm willing to pay certain prices, after all: once hiking a fastidious and entirely correct friend asked me to adjust my pack/sleeping-mat interface, based on "it's driving me nuts looking at the slovenly way you've attached it there"; he received only a snarl "if you don't want to look at my pack, all you need do is hike faster than me") and another the unexpected unpleasant lurks all places anytime but these are lessons essentially merely loitering in me, shibboleths to which I nominally subscribe/adhere but pay no mind, sets of thought but nearly empty ones, comprising the kind of code a man might abandon with nothing but a nag flickering at the nape of his neck, to, say, snag a few comestibles and accompany the world's best girlfriend in the world from a campsite to an adjoining beach for a sunset food/wine pairing not carelessly to be described nor quickly to be abandoned, the kind of code nagging that might make a man deeply paranoid and anxious upon the moment of a return to the campsite to find Rank Violation, the kind of code demanding the response to Rank Violation be infinite mental repeats of the notion "everything into the bear box before you walk away every time idiot", the kind of code that makes instant and complete sense out of bags torn and scattered, wrappers gnawed and spitty, vile pawprints tainting every item, nothing safe, nothing secure because nothing was (properly) secured, ruins strewn and surrounding and a sad self-rage imbuing every endeavour with an inalienable knowledge of failure.

Fucking raccoon incursion. Never leave your campsite alone. Never leave anything out and unattended. There's probably raccoon jizz on two-thirds of my belongings. Fucking raccoon incursion.