NJAFBIT: Greenberg

WHY I'M INTERESTED:
Baumbach's latest features Ben Stiller as a stalled, semi-matured bachelor, newly arrived in Los Angeles from New York, sleepwalking a fine line between clueless lost soul and listless old soul. Stiller is certainly capable of good acting, especially in this type of role (see: Flirting with Disaster) and, as a trailer, it's a wonderfully evocative grouping of scenes.

Baumbach has had no trouble keeping himself in my good graces, through both his scripts with/for Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Life Aquatic) and his writer-director gigs (Margot at the Wedding, Squid and the Whale.) Greta Gerwig, who I like perhaps a little too much considering how well she slips time and time again into the now-fabled "manic pixie dream girl" role (albeit each time with a hint of not-so-pureness,) plays Stiller's love/like interest. And Mark Duplass, on the heels of success in Humpday and Baghead, also makes an appearance, perhaps signaling the final death knell and assimilation of 'mumblecore' (whatever the hell it was, anyway) into the Hollywood machine.

Baumbach, having already tread the post-collegiate transitional blues in Kicking and Screaming, appears to be filing another report from the frontlines, this time from post-career, non-committal flailing middle-aged-dom. He's about as qualified as anybody. Throw in Rhys Ifans, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in horn-rimmed glasses (she is also co-writer,) and a tantalizing soundtrack by LCD Soundsystem genuis James Murphy, and I'm sold.

PREDICTION:
Two parts mumble-something, one part jittery NYC entitlement, one part Sundance-y sparkle.

RELEASE DATE:
3/26/2010

The Most Dangerous Decade

The era of the 'oughts' has ended. 2010 is upon us, and this is no small milestone.

For me, it represents my first opportunity to analyze a specific decade in an adult way (at least such as decades are commonly bookended, in ten year chunks, starting at a zero year.) Fittingly, for me personally, the ‘oughts’ provide a fine capsule of time, a nicely ordered and packaged progression, particularly as they relate to my education in the world of movies. To look back--I graduated High School in the class of 2000. Unkempt and uninterested, and swept up in real drama at home, going away to school was not an option. Pondering (read: avoiding) my community college destiny, I took a job, and sat by helpless as my friends shipped off and away to University, and I remained a lowly ‘townie.’ The job? Blockbuster Video. This, you remember, was the video industry’s moment of middle-age, its adolescence having only recently faded. I still remember putting up the store's first shelf of DVDs not long after I started, alien in their slim paper snap-cases, and marveling at the menus, chapter stops and (gasp!) bonus features. It would not be long before the new format was ubiquitous, and VHS was in a fight for its life. I watched it all pass before my eyes, friends. I ate Kit Kats and drank Fruitopias, and got paid eight bucks an hour for it. It was glorious, to a point. But it was not to last.

---

Some ancient history.. My ‘a-ha!’ moment in film (every moviehead has one,) was with Magnolia, which I first watched by myself in the basement of my father’s house, sprawled out with a pillow and a blanket on the floor. I can still picture its two-tape clamshell VHS rental case, held together through the middle by a rubber band. To an eighteen year old kid who grew up on John Wayne, Mel Brooks and bad Nineties sci-fi, it was a capital-R Revelation. My education then grew the way most’s do; I gradually started thumbing through the VideoHound book we kept in the store, putting names to coverboxes, learning the difference between a Producer and a Director, etc. And, above all, watching more movies. This was before the Internet took over everything--which is not to romanticize the time, exactly. But it was different. I didn't own a computer until about 2002. By then, things were beginning to come together for me a little bit. I heard about Kazaa. Armed with the world’s shittiest dial-up, I excitedly downloaded the Pixies version of the song from Eraserhead, and Roy Orbison (en espanol) from Mulholland Drive. The movie world was revealing itself to me, and in conversation I could pretty well hold my own.

I banged around in the video world for nearly half the decade, running the gamut of rental chains (Blockbuster, then to Hollywood, then to Lion,) and then finally to a quaint little outlet store for DVDs, which I ran for a year and a half or so out in Itasca. It was like a secret club for movie collectors; everybody who knew about it checked it out, and they always came back (the prices were unbeatable.) I remember fondly some of my loyal customers, a colorful lot. There was Ray, the truck driver, who loved old horror flicks and stopped by often on his lunch break, and who dubbed me a copy of The Skull on VHS (years before it came out on DVD,) which I still have. There was Nick, lanky and wild-haired, a lover of all things vintage, and always with an amusing anecdote about whatever I had playing on the TV (on Duel in the Sun; "’Lust in the dust!’ they called it!”). There was Big Bill, who never bought much, but always came to see me and bring me a small container of pipe tobacco (he knew I was a smoker.) And of course Barry, the filthy-rich lawyer with the sports cars, in leather jacket and shades, who collected so obsessively he would literally call in a weekly list of new releases (never less than fifty titles) to be pulled for his review and approval. They were good people. At this point, the DVD collector’s market was in full, beautiful bloom, and interesting titles were being released at an unsustainable clip. And there I was, with a box cutter and a DVD player in store, and access to them all. It was a fine education, indeed.

A lot of bartering went down there; I was free to administer a lot of off-the-books discounts, and my generosity never went unreturned. They all stopped by with something: a book on Buster Keaton or a card at Christmas, a gift card, an old poster. I'm glad to have experienced that old-fashioned style of retailing, but it was clear even then that the moment was not to be forever. Our little corner store just wasn't shifting the units the way top brass wanted. They shoveled me up to a desk job, which my poor brain tried on for size but ultimately violently rejected. And that was the end of that (the store itself was shuttered not long after.) But I kept up with movies, and with writing, and soon enough the two met and fell in love, and, um, here we are. True story.

Now, it’s a new decade, and I find myself in the position of seeing that world fade away before my very eyes. At 27, already my old stomping ground has become a rundown, abandoned lot. Blockbuster hasn’t been relevant in years, and the stores are dropping like flies (the one I cut my teeth in, in Lisle, is an awkward-looking Auto Zone now.) Movies on discs feel more and more passé every day. Retailers struggle to navigate the waters of digital downloads and super High Def. And movie lovers? Left somewhere in the fray, for now.

---

But what of the films themselves? Make no mistake; this decade will prove a marker. Already in the films I’ve experienced in 2010, I've begun to sense what the shift will be. An easy and all-too-perfect poster child is the recent Up in the Air, this year’s presumed Oscar horse. For all its pretensions of insight and lack of answers, Up in the Air does manage to convey quite nicely a fitting obituary to the death of the American happy ending, marking the moment when mainstream cinema officially divorced itself and split off from that haggard old Hollywood dinosaur—the ‘feel-good’ picture. Up in the Air enjoys a built in alibi for its bleakness; the global recession, which it exploits in its plotline as well, aping but not in any way commenting on the unfortunate realities of today’s economy. Notably, it does not even attempt to offer refuge. Why not? In the 40’s, Frank Capra, that grand chronicler of small-town America, at least had the good sense to send his viewers off with a smile. By comparison, Jason Reitman, who has ridiculously and completely prematurely been lauded by some as Capra’s second-coming, is content to simply identify the problem. It is here that he somehow endears himself to the new-age ‘cinerrati,’ even as he reveals his dearth of emotion. He really put his finger on it! Yeah, well, I’ve got a finger to offer in return.

I'm not OK with Up in the Air’s depiction of America in 2009. Does that mean, by proxy, that I’m not OK with America itself in 2009? I suppose it does. I'm not OK with posterity looking back and finding an era of wandering ghosts. I desire integrity, especially in the movies. Up in the Air has about as much to say about integrity as a tattered old pair of underwear. And the comparisons to Capra seriously make me want to puke. We watch Capra now (like we watch most old films now, those few of us that still do,) to drink in some small drop of the HOPE that they convey. The hope that, in fact, most films used to convey. But now, happy endings are viewed as trite, and in all but the most very trite of films, they are non-existent. The closest we get these days is the now- ubiquitous ‘dangling-thread’ ending, wherein filmmakers allow their viewers to, ahem, decide for themselves the fate of these characters, in whom it has been their job to invest us for the past 90 minutes or longer.

This seems to me to be a natural outgrowth of our modern life; too few experiences are thoughtfully mediated for us by a person these days. We check ourselves out at the grocery store; we pay our bills by automatic debit. Our cars can give us cross-country driving directions. We wish our friends and family members good morning and good night on their respective web profiles. We are no often required to rely on another person for anything in a given day. And when we do, it’s invariably an inconvenience. Who wants to wait for a bank teller when I can have my paycheck electronically beamed into my wallet? So too then—who wants to see a movie that gives me ideas about how to think? (That is, unless that’s already the way I think, a la Michael Moore, et.al.) Even the Oscar-bait feel-gooders are becoming harder and harder to find. Slumdog Millionaire lost most of its rags-to-riches luster when it was revealed that the film’s child star, a non-actor, had remained living in squalor in the Mumbai slums, even as the film (itself a horrendously sugar-coated depiction of the place) raked in millions at the box office. This is to say nothing of love stories, a practically non-existent genre, just as it often remains in modern life. It’s no wonder that (500) Days of Summer garnered so many sloppy comparisons to Annie Hall; it’s probably the closest thing our decade has given us, at least in the mainstream, but it’s still light-years away. Of course, I’m aware that these trends by no means began in the ‘oughts,’ but the global recession, born here in America and radiated outward across the globe, seems to have put the final nail in their musty coffins. But still I wonder--will we someday miss our happy endings? Will they now truly be forever doomed to dopily inhabit the dime-a-dozen Rom-Coms and Lifetime movies of the week? Is there room for resonant love stories, or any film born of integrity, in the high-brow film world?

---

Also appearing at the dawn of the new decade is James Cameron’s Avatar, raucously heralding a new day of techno-beefcake-panache destined to muscle its bloated, still-born visage onto movie screens for generations to come. Inhabiting at the same time the tiny fraction of cinemas not being devoured by Cameron’s mongrel techno-beast, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is by comparison a kind-of anti-Avatar, its effects looking as dated as Up in the Air’s supposed depression-era blueprints. As we watch an old trick crumble into dust before our eyes and behold its new embodiment (much like the ‘avatars’ of Cameron’s film) so too can we wonder: will we miss our old foe CG as well? That cursed demon, which we battled so mightily to extinguish, and which Cameron has now so thoughtfully taken upon himself to put a final bullet in its brain. Will we later long for the days when we didn't have to pay close attention to see what is real and what isn't? Will Starship Troopers, Men in Black and even that old sacred cow Jurassic Park feel charmingly quaint and old-fashioned, the way Them! and Invasion of the Body Snatchers do to us now? Yes, sooner than later, certainly they will.

It's an easy observation, but how fitting that the decade might be forever shorthanded as the 'Oughts,' a pair of big, fat, empty g00se eggs, waiting to be filled up with something. Are we up to the challenge in the new decade? Or will the ‘Oughts’ collapse deflated upon themselves? Will our emptiness be filled? Is a new era of integrity, fidelity and love on the horizon? And, if it isn't.. are we totally screwed?

I've got a 'Best of the Decade' list, which I'll be posting, with commentary, shortly. But I thought it only fitting first to give a goodbye to the decade itself. If the movies have endeavored to teach us anything at all in this decade, it's that we can always retreat to indulge in our passions, however vague or ill-conceived they might be. How we indulge them, what we make of them, and the ways in which they affect us remain open possibilities. But we are allowed our passions.

And it may well be that, in life as in the movies, we are not often predestined a happy ending, but will instead have to thoughtfully seek it out. Perhaps it’s still out there, buried somewhere in the electro-miasma of rental queues and digital streams, waiting, calmly and silently, to embrace us.

Screen Shots: The Big Lebowski

@ Lincoln Hall, Chicago. 1/6/10

7-7-7 (Day 3)

Two days in, I was rejuvenated, and about as excited as a person can be to go see a 50 year old movie at an 80 year old theater in a sleepy little suburb. Tonight, it was 3 Godfathers at the Tivoli. In Downers Grove, my old hometown.

Well, actually, my old adopted hometown. I lived in Woodridge, which is one town over, for about five years during high school. But Woodridge was (and still is) just houses and White Hen Pantries- DG was where the action was. And the Tivoli is right in the heart of it. Steps off the Metra stop in downtown Downers, in an old building which also houses a downstairs bowling alley, and a pizza joint. Straight up suburbs. Small Town, USA, with just a hint of white-folk ritz.

When I called it home, Downers was good to me. I drove my cars up and down its streets in summertime, to park in front of friends' houses, lugging bass amps down cramped stairwells and back up again. We drove down Ogden Avenue to the Omega restaurant at 3 AM, for free bread and hot coffee and dirty looks. We watched movies, too. In basements and living rooms, drinking liquor we shouldn't have had, laughing and smiling with that old, ecstatic purity of teenaged-ness. Lots of memories. Very few bad ones.

These days, the Tivoli spends most of its days (as it did then) sadly relegated to second-run movie house duties. On the day I visited, Monsters and Aliens (in 2D, sadly,) had just finished a run, and something else lousy was coming in behind it. The Tivoli used to have a sister theater, Tivoli South, which was on the other side of town, and about as ratty and run-down as they come (side note: it's under new ownership and has been converted into a movie house for exclusively Bollywood/Indian language movies. The delicious Sher-a-Punjab buffet and Bombay Bazar grocery are just a few steps away. It's like Mumbai, DuPage Co. edition.) But the Tivoli is no typical cheap theater. Not by a mile. Built in 1928 at the dawn of the sound era, when the huge, sprawling movie palaces were giving way to smaller (by comparison) and more plentiful theaters. By today's standards, it might as well be Carnegie Hall. Easily the most spectacular room in Downers Grove, the Tivoli has benefited from some loving care and restoration in recent years (no doubt there are quite a few patrons of the arts with deep pockets still left in town.) It's really something. Here's hoping that the Tivoli can keep its mojo forever.

I arrived a bit early, somewhat on purpose, as I wanted to grab a pint at Emmett's Ale House, one of the first micro-breweries I ever visited, at the dawn of my drinking years. Hitting the suburbs is a funny thing when you have the benefit of a few years mainly in the city to color your perspective. I suppose if you're looking for it, you're going to find people that annoy you anywhere you go. But that night, in that bar, I was surrounded by a flock of rapidly aging yuppies, with $50 haircuts, $500 jackets and $50,000 cars. I ordered my doppelbock, and it came in a snifter (?). Five years ago, I might have thought it was the best thing I ever tasted. Not so much any more. I paid and headed down to the show, and the soft din of the high-priced dinner conversation faded out of my ears. What a relief.

I've seen 3 Godfathers plenty of times; it's a nice choice to bust out around Christmas time. A loose retelling of the "three wise men" bible story, filtered through Ford's trademark Monument Valley/cowboy lens, and it has a universal appeal and an easy charm that suits most tastes. Was this my first Ford in the theater? Apart from Young Mr. Lincoln at the Chicago Outdoor Film Fest this Summer, I think so. It's late, minor Ford, to be sure; the great director is painting with a broad brush here (something about the size of a push-broom,) and nuance goes out the window pretty quick in favor of tear-jerky chest-grabbing moments, which are pulled off pretty admirably by the three godfathers of the title: John Wayne, Harry Carey Jr., and Pedro Armendáriz. Never one to leave us hanging, Ford's story of three men in search of new souls pushes (sometimes mashes) all the right buttons, and by the end, by trial and tribulation, they, like their unexpected child companion, have been reborn. Drinks are poured, songs are sung. What a yarn. So great.

The news had broken earlier in the month that Downers' annual summer hooplah, Heritage Fest, had been cancelled. The city couldn't afford it. Could it be true? Heritage Fest was like a high school reunion where your friends parents might show up. Seemed like we went every year, whether we wanted to or not. And we paid $6 a cup for Michelob, and ate the elephant ears. Cuz that's what the townie kids do. But were all grown up now. Very few of us left in Downers Grove proper. No more Heritage Fest? Shame for somebody, I guess. But I won't miss it.

The Tivoli, on the other hand, is a treasure. And worth the drive.

History of the Tivoli Theatre: http://www.classiccinemas.com/history/tivoli.asp

(images: click to enlarge)

7-7-7 (Day 2)

The Red Shoes
@ Music Box Theatre
12/14/09

Monday felt a lot shittier than it actually was. It wasn't very cold, but it might as well have been. I was slogging my way through the end-of-semester doldrums, having just completed a final which I was forced to wait half an hour to begin. Also, I had gotten back an assignment I thought for sure I was done with (it's a 100 level course, lady. If you want a works cited page, put that in the assignment sheet. It's a blowoff.) But the sojourn would not wait. The Red Shoes at the Music Box was on tap, showing at 5 and 8 (and for the MB's new discounted Monday ticket price of $5!) I walked out of class at 4:30, seemingly bound for the five o'clock show. My trusty iPhone calculated I would arrive at 5:05 via CTA. I took that as a challenge. I zipped up Washington, down the tunnel to the Red Line and made it down the steps... just in time to watch a train bound for Howard pulling slowly away. I cursed. (Specifically, I said "F*ck.")

This, plus the annoying developments at class, was enough to officially put me in a 'bad mood,' which is pretty rare for me. I hated every perfect, painted, peacoated yuppie mannequin in that tunnel, cooing emptily into their blackberrys about dinner reservations and primping themselves. I wanted to punch the sing-songy "spaare change, maaaaan" homeless guy standing a couple feet behind me. And when the next train north finally came and I squeezed in, every loudly rattling fixture in that train car made me want to smash the hell out of it with a ball-peen hammer. It did not look good. I stepped of the Red Line at Addison at 4:59. There was no way I could walk it. I needed a bus to save me, as I had to cut up a good 5 or 6 blocks to Southport. And there it was! Right as I came through the doors... four carlengths away and pulling out of sight. Again.

I smiled and stood, quietly enraged. These are the CTA moments. God. F*cking. Damnit. 5 o'clock was not happening. Even worse.. that was the bus I needed to get home. Seething, I waited for the next one. The wind picked up, of course, and it got colder. I put the closest thing I had to metal on in my headphones. I resolved to go home and catch the 8 o'clock. Via (*gasp*) my CAR.

Having a car in Chicago is something that I struggle with. In theory, I feel inclined to utilize CTA as often as possible, for reasons both economic and environmental. But tonight, I couldn't WAIT to get in that thing, crank up the heat, pop on a podcast, drive my happy ass warmly and quickly down to the Music Box, park right in front, take ten steps and be inside. And that is exactly what I did. Eco-babble be damned; sometimes you need to get a little selfish. Sometimes, you don't want the faux-company of the noisy, anonymous bus and train riders. Sometimes you just want to be left to your own crankiness.

The Red Shoes is a bonafide masterpiece- every inch as profound as The Seventh Seal or Rashoman, and twice as beautiful as both. The central conflict- the push and pull of love versus career, resonates more each time I see it. I may never have another chance to view it on the big screen, with its vibrant, lively colors splashed across a thirty-foot canvas. But its importance and beauty are absolutely certain to live forever. By the time it was over, any hint of my bad day bitching and moaning had long melted away. The dancing and the music had lifted my spirits. Movies can do that to you sometimes. They offer humanity in a box--all the tender moments, none of the difficulties of all those disappointing, annoying reactions. Good, cheap medicine for discomforted souls.

THE RED SHOES
Grade: A+

(images: click to enlarge)

7-7-7 (intro & Day 1)

A Serious Man
@ Landmark Century Cinema, Chicago
12/13/09


2009 had been another year of movies. Most of them solo.. But that's a different story. I had not at all reluctantly come to the realization during the course of the year that movies were to forever be, if not in some way a vocation (a guy can dream, right?) then at least a full time hobby for me. For life. I'm a movie guy. That's my thing.

It had been a long year and a short year. I had learned a lot and probably already forgotten most of it. I had moved back home, enrolled in a University. I was making progress. Some days were great, and some were lousy. Same as it ever was. But I was moving ahead, and the year was ending.

As finals time approached, I looked ahead to a personal end of semester tradition of mine- I always see a movie on or around the last day of class. Last semester, I saw Gran Torino, which I paired with a sit-down meal at Portillo's so sinfully gluttonous that it may have single-handedly condemned me to purgatory (or at least to my size 38 waist.) With the semester nearing an end, I began to scout for a movie to see. So much stuff was playing, and I wanted to see it all. Fantastic Mr. Fox. A Serious Man. A restored print of The Red Shoes. After I considered each one, I felt less inclined to let it go. Somehow, it turned into a list. Well.. I guess I could see a couple.. right? Why shouldn't I? Hadn't I worked hard? Wasn't I entitled? Of course I was, goddamnit. The more I looked, the more I found. 3 Godfathers was showing at the Tivoli in Downers. Wow. Couldn't pass that up. And A Christmas Carol (my favorite- the Alastair Sim version) at Bank of America on Saturdaqy night. I stopped at seven, and it hit me- 7 movies in 7 days. I paused and thought a moment. Wow. What a trip. Could I? Should I? It was so damn tantalizing. There they were, lining themselves up in front of me. Somehow I knew I couldn't talk myself out of it. I rearranged the movies around my work schedule, and amazingly, everything still fit. It was a puzzle that refused to go unsolved. I had to do it.

I needed a haircut. I needed a workout (or seven.) I had the finishing touches to put on one final, and another I hadn't even started. There was no milk in the fridge. I hadn't bought a single Christmas present, for anyone. And the contents of my bank account was rapidly approaching single digits. Could I even afford it? It didn't matter. None of it mattered. It was time to go to the movies. The schedule was set. No backing down. I would begin on Sunday.

Thanks to a couple of slow-as-molasses customers at work, who kept me a little later than I had hoped, I got out a few minutes late, and after valiantly taking to the streets and catching what I've no doubt was the slowest bus in town (Diversey, heading east,) I arrived at the Landmark Century about ten minutes too late to catch the 5 o'clock showing. Damn. No worries; it was playing again at 7:30. But I had some time to kill. Rather than overhear the annoyingly urban-sheik conversations of the patrons and wait around bored at the Borders across the street, I went for a long walk. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. Just brisk. I walked up Broadway, past the carolers out in front of one of the pubs. Past Aldine, the street my father and his brothers and sisters grew up on. And past the Treasure Island grocery store, where he used to walk, to his first job when he was a young man. By some small miracle, it had survived all these years. Before I knew it I was at Irving Park, so I cut over and back down Clark. I could have hopped a bus, but I didn't I peeked into the Full Schilling to see if a friend was there (he wasn't, amazingly.) Then on past Wrigley Field, and the hordes of meatheads and sorority flakes clogging the bars, screaming at each other on their cell-phones and smoking $10 packs of cigarettes. Past the makeshift Christmas tree lots, in the parking lots of McDonald's and Jewels, hemmed in by wrought-iron fences and strung-up lights. I overhear a woman ask if they accept credit cards. "Nope.. cash only, ma'am." She smiled and darted her head around for an ATM.

Chicago felt small, and it was small. And it was a beautiful night.

When I took my seat for A Serious Man, I knew from its opening shot of falling snowflakes that my plan was a good idea. Endearingly enigmatic, typically and wonderfully Coens-esque in its precision and economy, the film captivated me. It was funny, too, if tempered with sadness, as indeed most great comedy is. Chalk up another fine one for the brothers from Minnesota.

I could have stopped there. It would have been fine. But I didn't. I had six more to go.

A SERIOUS MAN
Grade: A

(stay tuned for six more entries to follow)

Log: Up

On second viewing, Up still strikes me the same- fun but flawed. The complete tonal shift that goes down when the the talking birds and talking dogs show up remains a big problem for me. While I admit that these bits are some of the best and funniest in the movie (Doug in particular is hilarious and adorable, and easily the best character in the movie,) it knocks me off balance just enough to put a kink in my enjoyment.

Great Pixar, like great Disney as a whole, makes its living on hearty helpings of pathos, and while it tries to bookend it on the front and back, Up's middle stretch is pretty much pure comedy. While I give them big props for stepping outside of their box, what we end up with is basically a Saturday morning cartoon on steroids; it goes great with a bowl of Cookie Crisp, but by the afternoon you'll be ready for bigger and better things.

PS- Disney/Pixar Exec's: I understand your (greedy) rationale, but not including the short film (the beautiful Partly Cloudly) on your Netflix DVD copies is nothing less than a cardinal sin. For shame.

Log: The Relic

The Relic is a real relic, alright. An artifact of a bygone era when movies had the balls to go for an R rating on the basis of language and gore alone. I remember it fondly... (**dream hands, tinkling sound..**)

The year was 1997. After her spectacular star-making turn in Big Top Pee-Wee, Penelope Ann Miller had flirted briefly with stardom at the dawn of the 90's, with roles in The Freshman and Carlito's Way. But with the breakout success of TV's "The X-Files," along with the dino-sized hit of Jurassic Park a few years before, a brief (but glorious) genre of B movie silliness had been born. The various cinematic gems/time capsules this movement produced, titles such as Sphere and Congo (both Michael Crichton adaptations,) as well as The Ghost and the Darkness, Contact, and Outbreak, were mainly action-y guy movies, either with a sci-fi/gore spin, or a creepy cool vibe with the requisite monster twist.

Producers were hungry to get their hands on the next Crichton, and here they stumbled onto the work of Douglas Preston and Lincold Child, and their series of novels based on the character of Pendergast. So what's the first thing they do? DELETE THE MAIN CHARACTER. I never read the books, but even so it's obviously an amazingly blockheaded move. Penelope Anne Miller is hot in that just-right, Dana Scully sort of way. In fact, the whole thing plays (as was no doubt intended) like a spooky/goofy "X-Files" episode.

Director Peter Hyams was a mini-fixture of this 90's scene (he also directed Time Cop and End of Days,) and rightly so, and his contemporary, Roland Emmerich, has continued to carry the torch. Every single scene in The Relic is lifted from something better, but the preferred franchise seems to be Aliens (and actually, the two films share a producer.) There's a monster at the end, and lots of ominous moments in the dimly-lit after hours of an old museum (Chicago's Field Museum, in fact.) But mostly it's just a lot of shots of people evaluating scientific data and looking through microscopes. Science is cool, kids. Or at least it was then.

The genre quickly spun off into the similarly short-lived "disaster flick" boom (think Twister, Volcano, Dante's Peak) and was lost forever. Not long thereafter, Duchovny left "The X-Files," and the genre had come full circle. This film is forgotten now, as are the rest of the films of this short-lived burst. In fact, you can't even get The Relic on DVD any more, unless you get it on a bargain-bin double feature flipper-disc with Pet Semetary 2. But I remember them all. And oh, what a time it was. (**end dream sequence**)

(even more appropriate: I watched this on Laserdisc!)

Now.. what's this about Avatar? Oh... I see. Never mind.

Screen Shots: Chandu the Magician

Bank of America Cinema, Chicago. 11/7/09

LOG: All My Friends are Funeral Singers

Musicians sometimes decide that they want to make movies. It just happens. There are at least two approaches they must first consider when this urge strikes. The musician can either step out of the band and away from their music to make a film (or films,) or they can create a film designed to compliment their previous work in the music world. Of this first approach, a few have come away with some mild success (Rob Zombie?), but more often they flounder in this new world of clapboards and boom mics (see: Ice Cube, Madonna, Prince, et. al.)

The second approach, whereby a musician creates a film to in some way accompany their own music, has proven a somewhat more lucrative and safer bet, and many fine examples exist (True Stories, Christmas on Mars, The American Astronaut, etc) All My Friends are Funeral Singers, a film by Tim Rutili, main brain of the uber-venerable Chicago-founded rock band Califone, falls into this latter category, and ranks fairly highly within it.

The film's star power (if you can call it that) comes courtesy of Angela Bettis, whose name rings strangely familiar, considering she has never really had any kind of 'breakout' role (her claims to fame would be her major role in Girl, Interrupted and later her starring role in the recent lo-fi horror favorite May.) Bettis plays Zel, a youngish woman earning a living as a psychic, inviting her sparse clientele into her home, which she shares with a ramshackle collection of (unseen to all but her) spirits, whom it seems play some part in her clairvoyance. The part is well cast and well acted, and her performance is memorable and rings true. As writer and director, some of Rutili's ideas play marvelously well (I love the idea of a widowed woman summoning her dead husband from beyond just so she can bicker with him the way she did when he was alive,) and some fall more flat (the mockumentary-style 'interviews' with the spirits felt strange and unnecessary.) But he is a gifted visual artist, and truly every frame of this film is thoughtfully crafted and gorgeous to look at. Fittingly given his band's rootsy, Americana foundations and tendency toward fiddles and banjo blues, Zel's woodsy old house gives off a southern gothic vibe. And although the film does not even for one frame break free from the house and it's immediate exteriors, the effect is not claustrophobic, but rather intimate and alive. Indeed, even though the film at times suffers from a lack of narrative propulsion, the same could be said of Califone. Rutili has transplanted the entire aesthetic of his band into this film.

In a mild spin on the traditional forms of the idiom, Rutili and the members of Califone are featured, quasi-Greek Chorus style, as characters in the film, a faction of Zel's in-house coterie of benevolent spirits. It is hard to say whether the film is better or worse for the inclusion of Califone, both as the music composer and as 'characters' in the film. I am tempted to believe that, with a little tweaking (which the film is still fairly likely to receive) and even minimal music, All My Friends could stand up fairly well on it's own as a sturdy little piece of festival fare. However, much as I truly enjoyed the visuals and the character of the film, I can't exactly guarantee that non-Califone fans would get as much out of the film as others. Though Rutili clearly wants the film to exist separately from his band (and their concurrently released album of the same name,) there's no way that they can, really; nor should they, as neither piece is as strong without the other.

As of now, the film is flying way below the radar, with no specific release or festival appearances yet announced (not even a measly IMDB page,) apart from the band's current tour, which features screenings of the film accompanied by a performance by Califone, playing (in remarkable sync) with both the incidental and song music in the film.

Califone have been accused of making the same record over and over again (see HERE.) If Rutili has another film in him (and I hope he does,) perhaps we'll find out how one note he really is.

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