top ten for 2009

In no particular order, just as they occur to me.

1. City of Saints and Madmen and Shreik: An Afterword by Jeff Vandermeer

2. The Year of Our War and No Present Like Time by Steph Swainston

3. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville

The first 3 there are basically the canon 'New Weird' writers/books, but these books/authors are some great reasons why its probably fair to say my preferred reading genre is more fantasy than scifi these days.

4. Mother London by Michael Moorcock

This book cements Moorcock at the center of my literary universe, a sun of impossible size and brightness.

5. Dandy in the Underworld by T. Rex

2009 involved a lot of Marc Bolan, the adding of the entire main T.Rex discography to my personal collection, in fact. But that album, that song, his last, I dunno, I guess there's some 12 or 13 year old boy I used to be that still says this is sorta what rock and roll is/was supposed to be like. Its sentimentality but you also suspect sneakily something else is there, something simpler and pure that can't be found anymore.

6. Slade in Flame by Slade

Slade at their peak are great and Slayed? and Slade Alive and the singles from before Slade in Flame ('Cuz I Luv U', etc) are also great but Slade in Flame is a tour de force.

7. Dr. Who DVDs from Multnomah County Library

Support your public library! I've been watching the available smattering of John Pertwee episodes pell mell, but MCPL has a strong selection of the Tom Baker years which I've been doing my darnedest to watch chronologically. Unfortunately they do not have the very first story i ever saw ('Underworld') which I am not even sure is available on DVD (reviews and synopsis point towards it being rather mediocre).

8. For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music

'Do the Strand' and 'Versions of You' are total jams.

9. Swords Against Death by Fritz Lieber.

A great volume of Lieber's Fafhrd & Grey Mouser stories, but the one about the birds with the women of Lankhmar wearing cages over their heads as fashion statements is unbeatable and gives Lankhmar that tangible being-there feeling that you also get visiting Meiville's New Crobozon or Vandermeer's Ambergreis or Swainston's Fourlands.

10. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo.

I aquired all six of the Dark Horse collected volumes of Akira this year, and the first three are a bit of a drag, given that if you've seen the movie you're reading a lot of material you've already seen, with some other stuff which is not in the film that you probably over-focus on because its unknown. Volumes 4-6 are fucking dynamite, though, and really cross over into top-notch sci-fi writing territory. And the final twenty pages or so qualify as the sort of 'revolutionary sci-fi' Moorcock spells out in his essay 'Starship Stormtroopers,' Viva the Greater Tokyo Empire!!!


-d.d.

10 favorite films of 2009

1. Love Exposure (2008, Shion Sono)-A 4 hour low-res digital video epic from Japan. Angst, unrequited love, and sex lay a thematic foundation. The film’s sense of humor and tenderness collide charmingly with prurient forays into taboo subcultures.

Now I know the exhilaration people who loved The Graduate must have felt after seeing it for the first time.

2. A Serious Man (2009, Joel Coen & Ethan Coen)-Household of suburban Jews in 60s Minnesota wander through a series of catastrophic plot points. Droll monument into the Coens’ own canon of dark comedies. Strikingly, the deceptively prosaic film adorns its muted-palette façade with, what boredom must look like.

Precision editing, sound and production design work hard to keep this drab delicacy from being as boring as it looks.

3. Lorna’s Silence (2008, Jean Pierre & Luc Dardenne)-Everyhipster couple find tumult by way of complications arising out of transnational romance, drugs, and organized crime. Shot in Belgium using the Dardennes’ signature vérité style.

Neorealism, if sold by American Apparel. Seriously though, the Dardennes’ tragedy about a junky is wholly worthwhile.

4. Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009, Lee Daniels)-Insightful and visually inventive flourishes abound in Daniels’ adaptation of the bestseller. Music video/photo shoot aesthetic helps make this narrative a little less difficult to endure.

Why didn’t I enjoy this more? Because the subject matter is so emotionally disturbing! Lee Daniels has created something wonderful, but this is the one title on my list that gets downright too dirty to deal with without feeling bad yourself. Gritty, greasy, and filthy—the subject matter exists in the same deplorable realm as the ghetto-horror squalor of its physical locales.

5. Extract (2009, Mike Judge)-Another giant leap forward in Judge’s efforts to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously. Amusingly peculiar characters arise out of real life, but always hang on to some quality that preserves their integrity.

I love Mike Judge’s feature films. While only his third movie to date, Extract is nearly a perfect cult comedy. Great addition to the likes of Office Space and Idiocracy.

6. Funny People (2009, Judd Apatow)-Smug tribute to the life of an A-list standup comic. By comics, for comics.

I kind of hated this when I first saw it. But, I cannot deny the credit which I feel Apatow deserves for gambling on the James L. Brooks style of mature, comedic drama. And he commits himself to his material. This guy’s ambitious: Knocked Up and Funny People succeed in presenting audiences with engrossing encounters which are intimate and authentic, dealing with subjects Apatow must know well—a wife experiencing childbirth, and the fraternity of standup comics.

7. World’s Greatest Dad (2009, Bobcat Goldthwait)-Acerbic, dysfunctional family comedy casts Robin Williams as a poetry teacher awkwardly struggling to rear an adolescent son.

Bobcat Goldthwait’s writing seems mired in the oversimplicity of a singular, narrative-driving idea which proves its point at the expense of everything else in the movie. His comedic moments make up for his shallow insights though. And there’s a genuine kindness to the pathos he instills in his characters.

8. Brüno (2009, Larry Charles)-Mockumentary about provocative Austrian fashion journalist dares us to ask ourselves: “This is fake right?”

I laughed.

9. Antichrist (2009, Lars von Trier)-A couple lose their child, and later travel into an evil forest.

While there’s nothing particularly fascinating about von Trier’s vision here, it came as no surprise that this qualified for most fucked up art film of the year. Doesn’t that sound fun?

10. The Headless Woman (2007, Lucrecia Martel)-Aristocratic Argentinean society abstracted through the prism of an unstable matriarch’s hysteria. Gorgeously art-designed interiors in the style of Almódovar sublimely help the film play out coolly.

My cinematic appetite for surrealism was at an all time low this year. With the exception of this movie, that is.

-Dregs

Chaos reigns

A black chalkboard scrawled on with bright colors illustrates three opening title cards. The first, accompanied with a jarring organ swell, has the name Lars von Trier. The second, followed by another violent cluster of musical notes, reads Antichrist. And finally the third reads Prologue.

A black and white montage begins in a tiled shower, as slow motion cinematography builds from a leaking faucet into a shower of water raining down over the entire frame. The couple (Charlotte Gainsbourg & Willem Dafoe--whoa, talk about a handsome pair!) are making love passionately. Stylized to the utmost, flurries of falling snow outside open windows are suspended near complete stasis--the poeticism of these elemental abstractions clearly harks back to Tarkovsky’s work in the seventies. And the somber “Lascia ch’io pianga” aria from Handel’s opera Rinaldo will undoubtedly stamp these opening few minutes with the typically criticized accusations of “pretentious,” “arty,” or “self-indulgent” from many, but I would here like to address this style of filmmaking as beautiful.

Perennial enfant terrible von Trier treats this material seriously. He wants the viewer to pay attention to this opening chapter because many details auspiciously reveal the nature of this duo which will be laboriously sketched out through the rest of the film.

Intercut with the shots of the couple making love are frames of their young child who wanders first into their room, then out their bedroom window to his death. Notice as these shots begin that the baby monitor near the couple is switched off; later you will be inclined to suspect who turned the device off--She or He.

Additionally, the prologue reveals a trio of figurines on a desk, later identified as “The Three Beggars,” named Grief, Pain, and Despair. At the beginning the miniatures’ likenesses are of people. Later, however the motif is repeated as an astral constellation and most memorably, as three animals: a deer (always seen birthing a stillborn fawn), a bird that will not die, and a fox.

Along with John Waters, Lars von Trier is currently one of the working filmmakers whom I have been a devout follower of for the longest. Back in the sticks when I was 16, then being an avid reader of Entertainment Weekly and having begun the transition into my then newly discovered arthouse phase, I recall Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwartzbaum both selecting the same film for their number one pick of their top ten list--Breaking the Waves (1996 Lars von Trier). After seeking the film out and watching it on a rented VHS, it would only be years later that I would be able to fully appreciate it.

In Portland, OR during the late 90s I was able to peruse von Trier’s full oeuvre thanks to Mike Clark’s Movie Madness Video & More (which is still my favorite video store of all time). Renting horribly dubbed VHS copies of The Idiots (1998), The Kingdom (1995) and The Kingdom II (1997) still ranks up on the top of my list of greatest movie experiences. And then there was the time I was able to see the advance preview screening of Dancer in the Dark (2000) at the Hollywood Theater on NE 41st St. and Sandy Blvd.

Dancer in the Dark was the most amazing experience (along with seeing Pulp Fiction 5 times in a month when I was 14) I had ever had the privilege of being rewarded with, by a film that met expectations generated months in advance. That film remains one of my favorite modern masterpieces from one of the greatest living auteurs of the 21st century.

Back to Antichrist (2009), the plot is told through an additional 4 chapters and an epilogue which involve the couple hiking through the woods to a cabin as they deal with the grief over the death of their son, Nicolas.

Forget pawning this off as misogynist or being preoccupied with the graphic extreme acts of sexual violence. There’s an artistic vision present which should not be overlooked. Antichrist reminds me of Dreyer’s films that also austerely revisited archaic orthodox religious practices, and there is something that has always been fascinating about setting horror tales in that milieu.

The film is an art-horror tale of madness, in which psychology and gender studies seem to be present while not specifically outlining any messages; it seems inappropriate to take this film too seriously because it works cinematically, but obviously suffers if over-analyzed or taken as some sort of statement.

It is also, like The Kingdom (1995/97), a haunting narrative which is embedded with victims of atrocious violence who linger as ghosts confronting protagonists in the present.

The animals, or “Three Beggars,” the woods (or specifically nature)-- referred to by She as “Satan’s Church”--along with its rain of acorns, are brush stokes used by von Trier in a manner which is enjoyable for those who appreciate his mischievous cinematic pranks in which he seems to revert to his contoversy-courting mode of visceral, transgressive narratives.

Trivial Observations: Charlotte Gainsbourg, daughter of 60s French pop-icon crooner Serge Gainsbourg, won the Best Actress Award at Cannes this year for her performance in Anitichrist.

This film was shot on digital video.

-Dregs

Attended screening at the Alamo Ritz on 11/21/2009 (first released in US on October 23, 2009). Unrated, 105 minutes. Distributed by IFC Films.

This pretty sums up all the main points

Little Cthulhu


-d.d.

that noise you just heard

Was DDT's mind BLOWING.

http://io9.com/5404048/moorcock-to-write-doctor-who

Noboru Iguchi's Robo-geisha is a pretty, visual delight of fun action

A Japanese businessman fawns over a geisha in a tatami room. Her body soon sheds itself in two, and a woman emerges who is equipped with mecha-armored forearms, a mask covering the lower half of her face and an armored geisha hair-doo. She still appears to be a geisha, though with a slightly different outfit. As she attacks the man (with metal blades emerging from her arms), the shell she has shed reforms and takes on a life of its own, as a geisha with a buzz-saw emerging from its mouth.

But, the battle soon becomes complicated when the businessman turns out to be a shell for two tengu-masked Japanese girls, one sitting on the shoulders of the other, who resume the fight with the Robo-geisha.

Robo-geisha (2009 Noboru Iguchi) is definitely the prettiest film I’ve seen this year and also the one in which I had the most fun. The first time I saw the trailer, I admit, I thought this looked stupid. But after seeing the 35mm print projected in a theater, I now see it as a work of art.

The rivalry which exists between a geisha and her sister who works with her is the center of the drama. The plot involves Kageno Steel, an evil corporation that kidnaps and brainwashes young women into servitude for corrupt purposes. And the CEO of the corporation, who happens to be the romantic interest of both the geisha and her sister, has a diabolical plan to take over the small town with his army of robo-geisha.

Tengu #1 and tengu #2 are collectively referred to as the tengun. Played by Cay Izumi and Asami, these girls wear black boots, fishnets, bikinis, and red, phallic-nosed, evil-looking masks (matching masks cover their breasts, and shoot out corrosive “milk from hell”). The tengun are the coolest part of the movie because they are not only badass mecha-equipped warriors with, among other things, ass-katana, they are also abrasively loud, aggressive, and sexy counterpoints to the sweet Robo-geisha who features as the film’s protagonist.

Cay Izumi (left) and Asami.

Robo-geisha's director, Noboru Iguchi.

The tengun in costume.

The color palette, with its pink hues and soft shades, and CGI blood make for a glossy, although absurd, visually delightful and highly entertaining work from Iguchi. This exploitative film’s final act left me aghast with pleasure. Consistently comical, Robo-geisha’s innocent playfulness has no peer when it comes to cool, imaginatively implausible fun. Unsurprisingly, special makeup effects artist Yoshihiro Nishimura teamed up with Iguchi again on this film, and the two have something wonderful going on here.

Trivial Observations: In the second act, when Robo-geisha meets her first client, the Japanese Yakuza boss is played by Yoshihiro Nishimura.

In attendance for the film, Noboru Iguchi informed the audience that in the print screened, “hip-katana” was incorrectly translated in the subtitles, and should actually read “ass-katana.”

-Dregs

Attended screening on 9/25/09 at Fantastic Fest, Robo-geisha premiered in Japan on October 3, 2009.

After the screening, the tengun fought in the theater.

And then things just turned into comptete chaos.

The House of the Devil deserves credit for developing tense atmoshpere while letting its story unfold

During the early 1980s, 70% of people believed in the existence of Satanic rituals being practiced in the United States.

Over 30% of them rationalized the occurence of unsolved violent crimes due to Satanic cults.

This is based on those events.

In a quiet neighborhood, overcast skies above and autumnal foliage convey the season. A young woman in a gray, insulated nylon jacket, bundled up with a white knit hat and scarf, receives instructions from a middle-aged woman about the particulars of the new room she will be renting. This surprises the young woman because the landlady has called her on short notice, citing the cause as the sudden disappearance of the tenant who had previously made plans to rent the room.

The House of the Devil (2009 Ti West) returns to, as Ti West referred to it, the “Satanic Panic” craze of the early 80s. The opening vignette lays down a small detail: the girl who was supposed to rent the room before Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) "seems like trouble,” and is unable to commit to the living arrangements. As the plot unfolds, Samantha responds to a post on the bulletin board of her college campus which ominously reads, simply, “babysitter needed.” After she shows up for the job, she hears that there was another girl interested in the opportunity, but she was “unreliable.”

It’s best not to spoil anymore of the plot.

Stylistically, West has committed to the fashions of the early 80s. Samantha and her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig), both with respective brunette and blonde feathered hair, and in Megan’s case, acid-washed jeans, revisit styles of this bygone era.

College life is similarly depicted with respect to the period, and early on, the pizza-parlor location, dorm life and sleeping in evoke the simple, carefree, daily lives of the film’s protagonists.

The highlight of this movie is the casting of the couple who have put out the babysitter ad. Particularly Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan, who seems to be perfectly cut out for this type of role, delivering a chilling performance), the owner of the large house which holds the suspense West carves his Polanski-inspired tension out of.

Unlike other recent horror films, The House of the Devil is not a hyper-kinetic freakout. The story builds at an assured (sometimes slow) pace, and Ti West succeeds at crafting an atmosphere-driven narrative with subtle details. The lunar eclipse which takes place on the night the film is set, for example, adds to the appeal of this modest, quality horror effort.

Trivial Observations: During the Q & A, Ti West mentioned Roman Polanski’s trilogy of apartment-living thrillers: Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and The Tenant (1976) as inspirations for this film.

Dee Wallace (landlady in opening scene) and Mary Woronov (Mrs. Ulman) also appear in the film. Wallace has a cameo and Woronov acts her role in a frightening capacity.

This film was shot on super 16.

-Dregs

Attended screening of The House of the Devil on 9/29/09 at Fantastic Fest. Magnolia Releasing will be giving the film a limited theatrical run (including Austin) starting tomorrow, October 30, 2009. Rated R, 95 minutes.